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 towards 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, this is why we like it so much. And the lead here goes towards ...  ah well. What did you think eh? BTW once we dropped HT in the BIOS the results dropped massively as well hovering at 9'ish FPS. That's how important Hyper-Threading is for the Core i7.

Contact Searching

We fire off two threads at the processor and observe how it deals with more every day tasks such as searching for contacts. So only two cores are really used in this test, but it's a strong MS office application often used..