Intel i7 950 Upgrade

Computing

I recently upgraded my CPU to an Intel i7 950 from an Intel Core 2 Duo E8600. I am still trying to figure out why I did though, my old spec worked quite well. I went to a computer fair to buy a NAS box but ended up also coming home with upgrade bits, dangerous places Computer Fairs…

Apart from the Intel i7 950 I also bought a Gigabyte Motherboard a X58A-UD3R and a couple 2Gig sticks of Kingston DDR3 RAM, I purchased the X58 board because I read about the issues Intel has with the 1155 Sandy Bridge Chipset. You can read about that over at CNET here

I have a post about an upgrade I did on my movie box which you can read here, in that review I used a program called x264 benchmark it basically converts a HD video file to an x264 high quality video file. The benchmark is available from Techarp which you can get from here.

Running the program through a command prompt for my original CPU gave me the following results.

Intel Core 2 Duo – E8600
———- RUN1PASS1.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 92.10 fps, 1850.89 kb/s

———- RUN2PASS1.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 58.62 fps, 1850.89 kb/s

———- RUN3PASS1.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 57.77 fps, 1850.89 kb/s

———- RUN4PASS1.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 59.45 fps, 1850.89 kb/s

———- RUN5PASS1.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 59.56 fps, 1850.89 kb/s

———- RUN1PASS2.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 18.35 fps, 1826.32 kb/s

———- RUN2PASS2.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 14.79 fps, 1826.37 kb/s

———- RUN3PASS2.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 15.09 fps, 1826.37 kb/s

———- RUN4PASS2.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 15.08 fps, 1826.32 kb/s

———- RUN5PASS2.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 14.39 fps, 1826.37 kb/s

And for my new CPU I got the following results.

Intel i7 950

———- RUN1PASS1.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 197.38 fps, 1849.61 kb/s

———- RUN2PASS1.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 198.43 fps, 1849.61 kb/s

———- RUN3PASS1.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 198.43 fps, 1849.61 kb/s

———- RUN4PASS1.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 198.77 fps, 1849.61 kb/s

———- RUN5PASS1.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 198.80 fps, 1849.61 kb/s

———- RUN1PASS2.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 71.27 fps, 1834.22 kb/s

———- RUN2PASS2.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 71.41 fps, 1834.86 kb/s

———- RUN3PASS2.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 71.36 fps, 1834.86 kb/s

———- RUN4PASS2.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 71.69 fps, 1834.86 kb/s

———- RUN5PASS2.LOG
encoded 1749 frames, 71.41 fps, 1834.22 kb/s

I’m not going to give you fancy percentage gains or charts all you have to do is just look at those numbers, the last pass on my old CPU 14.39 fps the last pass on my new CPU 71.41 fps, All I can say is damn!

It’s a pity I don’t actually do much x264 encoding, but I guess it’s nice to know if I do then this CPU is more than up to the task! :)

I did try some video encoding using the new TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works 5 program which I upgraded to from TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress. It wasn’t the best test but it did show some improvements.

The screen shot below shows me encoding a MPEG file to a DivX file, the time it took was just over 4 minutes. The encoding engine in the program is using both cores.

Pic Encoding a video with my old CPU

Encoding a video with my old CPU

With the new CPU, it took 2min 51 secs. You may see in the screen shot below that for some reason task manager only displays 2 cores even though this CPU is a quad core, I was unable to find out why this is the case nor was I able to find a fix, it shows all 8 threads fine, I thought maybe Windows wasn’t seeing all the cores but it does and so does the program I’m using.

Pic Encoding a video with my new CPU

Encoding a video with my new CPU

Another issue I found was not all threads seemed to be getting used, if you look in the pic above you can see that a couple of threads didn’t appear to be working, using the tried and trusted Google search I found that Microsoft has a feature called core parking built into Windows 7

You can read about it here at this Technet blog, thankfully I found that you can disable this “feature” and at Ultimatecomputers they show you how.  

So final thoughts! Yes it’s fast, yes I will be able to encode x264 a lot quicker but did I need it? No not really… but I’m happy with my purchase, it’s like owning a V8 vehicle, you know you have the power when you need it just in case you need to go quick.

Cheers

Aaron