Cinebench R10 64-bit

Maxon produces Cinebench R10. It is based on their Cinema 4D animation application and is very CPU intensive. It allows benchmarks to be conducted using one, or all available CPU cores. Additional cores can provide very large improvements in Cinebench scores.

Three tests are conducted using Cinebench; the first is the rendering test utilizing only a single core; the second uses all available cores. Once both tests are conducted, Cinebench reports how much faster the multi-threaded test was. This scaling information is useful to determine how well multiple cores scale during rendering workloads.

The third test is the Cinebench OpenGL 3D rendering benchmark and we’ve thrown that in for good measure as well.

Cinebench favors cores and clock speed, putting both chips at a disadvantage from the get-go. Despite this, the Phenom II X2 550 does a surprisingly solid job competing with the other processors. The extra cache and clock speed allow it to creep ahead of the Athlon II X2 250 in single-threaded testing. If we wrote a children’s story, the Phenom II X2 550 would be named The Little Dual Core That Could.

Two cores and HyperTransport make for extremely efficient scaling.

We were really surprised then to see the Phenom II X2 550 pull into third place on our benchmark here. Gamers take note! The Phenom II X3 720 has made a name for itself as a good gamer processor, but the Phenom II X2 550 may be out to take its throne.