Intel 8 Core Media Creation PC

We have covered a lot on multi-core processor technologies in the past and

have also reviewed many servers and workstations which use multi-core

technologies. Here we present an exclusive preview of an 8 core media creation

PC based on the Intel Workstation board S500XVN. It came to us loaded with dual

Quad-core Intel Xeon X5365 processors. As the name suggests, this is meant for

media creation, so to test it, we tested it with a variety of media creation

benchmarks. To ensure that the OS didn't become a bottleneck, we ran all

benchmarks on a 32-bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate edition.

We ran both synthetic and media creation/rendering benchmarks on it. These

included PCMark 2005, 3DMark 2006 and Open CPU benchmarks. Plus, we also

stressed it withvideo encoding and rendering applications. Our objective was

simple--to gauge the difference between applications running on a single core

vis-à-vis multiple cores. As the results show, there was a significant

difference in the encoding time. For video encoding, we converted a 500 MB movie

CD to WMV format. For this, we used Media Encoder 9-first on a single core and

subsequently on all the cores. What took 160 minutes to do with a single core

took only 67 minutes to complete with all eight cores. We then repeated the same

process using the PovRay benchmark. Once again, the results can be seen in the

graphs below. In the Open CPU benchmark, the CPU score increased with an increase in the number of cores, but only till 4 cores.

After that, the score became constant. Possibly, the benchmark was not geared to

use all the cores. One small caveat we found was that the board had only one PCI-Express

16x slot. So you won't be able to benefit from multipe graphics cards and use

nVidia's SLI or ATI's CrossFire technologies.

The time to encode a 500 MB movie file reduced considerably as we increased cores

All benchmarks except Open CPU showed a steady rise in performance with an increase in the number of cores

Bottom Line: The machine will be a real boon for media creation professionals, with the kind of performance it delivers.

The board has only one 16x PCI Express slot. We wished it had two, so that one could plug-in two SLI or CrossFire graphics cards for better graphics performance.

The board has six SATA ports out of which 2 have RAID support (0,1, and 10). In our tests, we used 7200 rpm, 120 GB SATA hard drive	Media Creation PC uses two 64-bit, Quad-core Intel Xeon X5365 processors, each running at 3.0 GHz, with a 1,333 MHz FSB. This is faster than any currently available desktop Core 2 Duo processor. Each CPU has 8 MB of L2 cache. It supports Intel SpeedStep and virtualization technologies.

The board needs a powerful, 850 W		The board supports DDR2 667 MHz FB DIMMs and has 8 DIMM slots, which can take up to 32 GB of memory. We tested the board with 4 GB FDIMM.