Benchmark Results: Professional Applications
3ds Max utilizes as many cores as it can. And although Ivy Bridge gives us slight IPC improvements over Sandy Bridge, the older architecture's more willing overclock ends up delivering better performance. Meanwhile, even though Sandy Bridge-E is running a little slower, its two extra cores enable a nice performance advantage.
The same story applies to FineReader, our OCR-based workload. Ivy Bridge's 4.5 GHz just can't keep up with a Core i7-2600K at 4.8 GHz. The Core i7-3960X trumps all, though.
Same thing in Blender. Ivy Bridge ends up in last place compared to the two other overclocked platforms.