Intel Core i9-11900K processor review

Processors 199 Page 7 of 33 Published by

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Performance - CineBench 15 (and IPC)

Challenges of testing a processor

Each year, it is getting increasingly complicated to test processor performance accurately; the motherboard manufacturers control many settings. On the other hand, Intel does not release reference review motherboards anymore; thus, motherboards manufacturers will do tons of tweaks 'at default' in the BIOS to stay ahead of the competition and spread their lineup relative for performance from mainstream towards premium. Settings can include All cores frequency locks, clock tweaks, and enhancements in power states and duration (PL2). For a motherboard review, this is all fine; however, we want to test as close as possible to reference performance for a processor review. To bypass these challenges, in the BIOS, we disable such features. An example you see below (ASUS) Intel Turbo ratio settings see below:


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Example of how we configure the BIOS for reference processor reviews - we try to bring down processor reviews as close as possible to Intel reference settings. That also means that each motherboard in its default settings will perform differently. 


We expect you will see lots of reviews with higher performance numbers as many media will load up BIOS defaults and start testing without checking. We thus test at reference performance (or as close as possible) with settings as referenced by Intel. For motherboard reviews, we, of course, revert to motherboard defaults as it is well within their right to segment and optimize their lineup performance-wise.

Processor performance: CineBench 15

CB15 supports systems with up to 256 threads. The performance of processors and graphics cards is, as usual, determined on the basis of 3D scenes. A selection of test results allows a rough classification of the benefit of your own system. The CPU test is a scene with around 280,000 polygons used, while the GPU test based on OpenGL comes with about a million polygons, high-resolution textures, and various effects. The results will be issued in final points (CPU) and fps (GPU). According to the developers, the software has been "extensively developed to exploit the performance of new hardware as possible." The results are unsurprisingly not comparable with those from earlier versions. 


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Instructions per cycle (IPC)

This IPC test will build up and get updated over time. We lock all processor cores at 3500 MHz. That way, you can see the architecture performance of the processor clocked at the same frequency. This is a single thread measurement. For many people, this is the holy grail of CPU measurements regarding how fast an architecture per core really is. I, however, tend to say there's more to it than that, and that would be higher frequency allowances, caches, and memory latency defining that per-core performance.



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