Intel Core i7-980X Gulftown Six-Core 32nm Processor Review

Synthetic Benchmarks: CPU & Memory

Lavalys Everest Ultimate

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all benchmarkers or overclockers. With the ability to pick up most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms on your desktop. We selected two of Everest's seven CPU benchmarks: CPU Queen and FPU Mandel. According to Lavalys, CPU Queen simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic "Queens problem" on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. The FPU Mandel benchmark measures the double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular "Mandelbrot" fractal. Both tests consume less than 1 MB system memory, and are HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware.


Needless to say that the i7-980X's first result raised some eyebrows. Despite trying out all the latest Beta versions of Everest, we consistently got the same results. While the FPU Mandel results are right where we would expect them to be, the CPU Queen results were about 30% higher than expected. We suspect that there's probably an issue with this particular test being run across 12 logical threads.

Lavalys Everest Ultimate

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all benchmarkers or overclockers. With the ability to pick up most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms on your desktop. In addition to this, the memory benchmarking utility provides a useful tool of measuring the changes to your memory sub-system.


Our memory bandwidth results were a little lower than expected when compared to the i7-975, especially with regard to copy speeds. We suspect it might be an issue with the BIOS, or perhaps Gulftown's Uncore/integrated memory controller is slightly different than Bloomfield's, perhaps due to its being utilized by 2 additional cores.


On the latency front, the i7-980X also proved to be a little slower than the i7-975.


Will ScienceMark 2.0 paint a different picture? Let's find out.

ScienceMark v2.0

Although last updated almost 3 years ago, and despite its rudimentary interface, ScienceMark v2.0 remains a favorite for accurately calculating bandwidth on even the newest chipsets.


The memory bandwidth rankings are fairly similar to Everest's, which is to say the the i7-980X does appear to have slightly lower overall memory bandwidth than the i7-975.



Surprisingly, the i7-980X achieved a lower latency figure than the i7-975 in ScienceMark, but just barely so.

These are just synthetic numbers though, real-life applications and games are what count. Let's check those out next.