Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 – The New Budget Superstar?

3DS Max 9

As an industry-leading 3D graphics application, Autodesk’s 3DS Max is one of our more important benchmarks. If there are people who will benefit from faster CPUs with lots of cores, it’s designers of 3D models, environments and animators. Some of these projects are so comprehensive that they can take days to render. At this time, the application does not support SSE4 and will likely not in the future due to irrelevant instructions.

For our test, we are taking a dragon model which is included with the application, Dragon_Character_Rig.max, and rendering it to 1080p resolution (1920×1080). For a second test, we render the same model, but all 60 frames, to a 490×270 resolution .AVI.

Our results here are interesting. When Intel first launched their 45nm processors, they boasted the fact that clock for clock, 45nm should prove faster than 65nm. That’s observed here when comparing the QX6850 to the QX9650. More interesting, is that even though our E7200 has a slower clock speed than the E6750, the results between the two are near identical. Considering 3DS Max does not touch SSE4, that’s impressive.

Adobe Lightroom 1.4

Years ago, you’d have to fork over a roll of Benjamin’s in order to get a piece of great technology, but that’s not the case anymore. For a modest fee, you can set yourself up with some absolutely killer hardware. Luckily, one area where that’s definitely the case is with digital cameras. It’s cheaper than ever to own a Digital-SLR, which is the reason why they are growing in popularity so quickly. As a result, RAW photo editing is also becoming more popular, hence the topic of our next benchmark.

Adobe Lightroom is an excellent RAW photo editor/organizer that’s easy to use and looks fantastic. For our test, we take 100 RAW files (Nikon .NEF) which are 10 Megapixel in resolution and then export them as JPEGs in 1000×669 resolution… a result that could be easily passed around online or saved elsewhere on your machine as a low-resolution backup.

Similar to 3DS Max, Lightroom shows some increased performance on the 45nm offerings in some cases, clock for clock, but in this case, the added 45nm benefits did not outweigh the higher frequency of the last-gen chips. The E6750 outpaced our E7200 by six seconds, which scales relatively close to the actual frequency increase.