I did one other test last night that was anything but short of amazing. I do some 3D Animation at work and at home every once and a while, maybe more often now at home with this rig. At work I got a Xeon E5405 @ 2.0Ghz (Quad) w/16Gigs of ram and at home I had a E8400 @ 4.05Ghz (Dual) w/4Gigs of ram. These 2 systems where within roughly 1-2% of each other at the end of the day for amount it could render.
How I typically calculated overall GHz is roughly 80% of speed for every additional core. While this tosses that off a little bit in that respect but... Now if they where running within a 1-2% margin (could favor either CPU) that general rule at least with 3D Studio Max would be off, somewhere.
E5405 = 6.8Ghz
E8400 = 7.29Ghz
Right there its showing a 7.2% in speed difference so my CPU processing power is a little messed up from the way I did it, but I know just adding cores to the mix isn't a 98% or even a 99% gain in speed. Programing is just not that efficient in multi-threaded apps since there has to be overhead. Since I wasn't going to take the time to render on both these computers I just did the one at work, since before it was as stated within a 1-2% margin.
Anyways So moving forward, now I have the i7 920 @ 3.66Ghz (Bios) 3.65Ghz (Actual). If I did at least some of the calcs the same, still 90% for the core speed (improvements to memory controllers helping out here), hyper-threading would have to be say 30% more power per core on the high end.
i7 920 @ 3.65Ghz = 13.5Ghz (actual cores) + 4.05Ghz HT (Figured as 1's Core = 3.65*.3, and additional Cores 3.65*.9*.3) = 17.55Ghz
All above was done prior to actual tests
And the results listed as follows (all in seconds), E5405 @ 2.0Ghz (Quad) / i7 920 @ 3.65Ghz (Quad)
169 / 061 = 2.77x Quicker
199 / 072 = 2.76x Quicker
129 / 044 = 2.93x Quicker
115 / 041 = 2.80x Quicker
091 / 032 = 2.84x Quicker
759 / 259 = 2.93x Quicker
Combined Total
1462 / 0509 = 2.87x Quicker
So with saying that my CPU would have to be say roughly in terms of Ghz...
19.51-20.92Ghz of processing power Compared to my work/old CPU. So with that even my guesstimated total for Ghz for my i7 is now off which was sitting at 17.55Ghz so just by going by this hyper-threading would be roughly 50% of the core speed to get into the same ball park.
i7 920 @ 3.65Ghz = 13.5Ghz (actual cores) + 6.75Ghz HT (Figured as 1's Core = 3.65*.5, and additional Cores 3.65*.9*.5) = 20.25Ghz
Course I could turn off HT and get better results, but WHY HT rocks
Im glad they brought it back and its defiantly waaay more efficient then it once use to be.
As for temps during this test LinX went down since I dropped the voltage (think it was 73C tops) and running this it was getting 68C barely spiked to it once.
