EVGA Classified Super Record 2 SR-2 Motherboard Review

Performance Results

Armed with our pair of x5670 CPU’s and a set of x5570 CPU’s, it was finally time to get some testing completed. We’ve included overclocked x5670 results here as well!

Overall, the numbers are pretty remarkable. The x5670 is able to put a lot of distance between itself and the pair of x5570 CPU’s. Remember that x5570 is the same 2.93GHz clock speed but is a quad core/8 thread CPU where the x5670 is a six core/12 thread CPU.

In Sandra we don’t see a gradual increase in memory performance. This test only makes use of 8 threads so it’s interesting to see the small performance gap between Nehalem (x5570) and Westmere (x5670).

wPrime is able to take advantage of all the active threads we have in either set up. As you can see, the x5670 is quite a bit faster here, with a big jump in performance on the 1024M test.

Cinebench 11.5 is the latest benchmark update to MAXON’s 3D content creation software. We see nearly a 50 percent jump in performance between Nehalem and Westmere setups. When overclocked we see another big jump; that’s what happens with 24 threads at 4.2GHz!

Finally some gaming! StarCraft II is the long awaited sequel to one of the most popular games ever. Unfortunately, StarCraft II only scales to clock speed once you have more than two CPU cores.

Everyone’s favorite question, “But will it run Crysis?” gets answered. We see some scaling going on between the different CPU architectures but it isn’t much. It’s likely the performance difference comes down to the larger cache found on Westmere. Still, a higher clock speed rather than more CPU cores is going to get you better performance in Crysis.

x264 shows the x5670 in a very good light. Pass 1 does not have many instances of multiple threads being used, at least for a multi-cpu system. Pass 2, however, can call all 24 available threads into action, as we see brief 90 percent spikes of CPU usage. Clearly, the x5670 rules here. Keep in mind that a powerful single core CPU like the i7 930 does not break 30fps in Pass 2 and you start to realize how much extra performance a dual CPU system has.

Since we were testing with an overclocked ATI HD5850, CPU performance was not the limiting factor for 3DMark Vantage. We’re showing the CPU score here to give you an idea of how well this synthetic test scales with these CPU’s. Obviously, it’s rare to see any scaling that Vantage shows here in a real game test.

Finally, we have Power Consumption. When it’s overclocked, 287 Watts at idle doesn’t sound like much until you remember that there is only one video card in this system. Add in a couple of GTX 480’s and you’ll surely notice a rise in your power bill just having the system on. The power consumption of the stock speed x5670 is quite good for the performance you get. In our opinion the best setup would be to overclock these CPU’s as high as you can on the default voltage (ours were just over 1v). There is a point of diminishing returns and it’s well before 4GHz.