We recently stumbled onto this great little tool called Kribi bench. It is a 3D rendering benchmark produced by the people at Adept Development. Kribi bench is an SSE aware software renderer where a 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU and the average frame rate is reported. Now the great thing is, it therefore bypasses the GPU .. so everything is in direct relation to your memory and CPU.

We used two of the included models with this benchmark: a "Sponge Explode" model consisting of over 19.2 million polygons and the test suite's "City" model that is comprised of over 107 billion polygons. The score is the actual number of frames rendered by the CPU per second.

This software is a 100% multi-threaded application, which loves SMP, HT and everything you can throw at it. We always see the multiple cores kick in very well with this test, obviously the Core i7 takes a lead. But again we see a tremendous performance increase for Phenom II.

The Phenom II X4 940 is dead on performance wise with the Core 2 Quad QX9770 extreme.

3DMark 06 CPU test

Well, everybody loves 3DMark06, and nowadays, it's CPU limited, making it an excellent application to check CPU performance. The scores that you see obviously are the CPU test itself, not overall 3DMark06 scores.

Core i7 is faster for sure as well as the QX9770. Once we start to overclock, the dynamics change and we see the performance pick up real fast.