Meet Cinebench R15 Extreme – The Ultra Demanding CPU Benchmark for High-end CPUs

Most CPU benchmarks are designed to finish quickly, making it easy for users to quickly gather performance data for their systems and share their results to impress their peers with their system’s performance levels. 

Today, Guru of 3D has released an unofficial version of Cinebench R15 that is set to make the benchmark last much longer and provide a more accurate representation of CPU performance and its core boost characteristics. This modded version of Cinebench R15, which is called Cinebench R15 Extreme, is designed for 16 core processors and uses a rendering resolution that is 4x as high as Maxon’s official benchmark.  

A large problem that faces PC benchmarking is the question of reliability, especially now that CPUs with incredible core counts are making their way ever closer to the mainstream market. We only have to look as far back as Broadwell-E to see 10 cores and 20 threads as the pinnacle of what the high-end desktop market had to offer, but now 8-core processors are relatively common on mainstream CPU sockets, and a staggering 64 threads are available for less than $2,000 thanks to AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX. 

With core counts exploding in both the mainstream and enterprise CPU markets, traditional CPU benchmarks have become too fast to run. The likes of Cinebench R15 takes a handful of seconds to run on today’s high-end offerings, giving little time for the processor question to heat up, and show an accurate representation of the processor’s boost clocks in longer-term workloads. 

Cinebench R15 Extreme is designed to provide more accurate data than the standard version of Cinebench, thanks to the fact that it works high-end processors for longer and can force processors to push their boost clock speeds lower than the standard version of Cinebench R15, better simulating long-term workloads.