Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition Processor Review

Photodex ProShow Gold 3.2

ProShow Gold allows the user to combine photos, videos and music to create spectacular slide shows. The software provides the capability to share memories with friends and family on DVD, PC and the Web. ProShow Gold brings still photos to life by adding motion effects like pan, zoom, and rotate. The user can also add captions to a photo or video and choose from over 280 transition effects.

The workload we are using takes 29 high resolution jpeg photos and converts them to an mpeg2, widescreen DVD quality, 3min 9sec slideshow video file. The input photos are in 3872×2592 resolution and total about 170MB in size.

ProShow Gold 3.2 lets you share your slide shows in virtually any format and on any device. You can upload your shows directly to YouTube or choose from over 20 devices to directly output to including the iPod, Blackberry, ZuneTM and more. Not bad for software that runs under $70 and is optimized for eight-cores! Our benchmark testing wasn’t at 100% load the entire time, but averaged around 95% during the testing period.

Benchmark Results: Photodex Proshow Gold 3.2 software showed that the Intel Core i7-975 processor was able to beat out the Intel Skulltrail platform! This is the very first time a quad-core processor with Hyper-Threading was able to knock down the 2P server/enthusiast platform running a pair of true quad-core processors. This is impressive considering just one Intel QX9775 procesor runs $1555! That means the $1,039 Core i7 975 Extreme edition just beat a system using $3110 worth of processors! This is very significant and it’s no wonder Intel recently announced that the QX9775 was being discontinued.

For those that are interested on December 9, 2008 Photodex Proshow Gold 4.0 was released and it is much faster. For example our Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition took 59 seconds to complete our work suite on v3.2, but on v4.0 it took just 43 seconds.