The Intel Xeon W Review: W-2195, W-2155, W-2123, W-2104 and W-2102 Tested

Benchmarking Performance: CPU Office Tests

The office programs we use for benchmarking aren't specific programs per-se, but industry standard tests that hold weight with professionals. The goal of these tests is to use an array of software and techniques that a typical office user might encounter, such as video conferencing, document editing, architectural modelling, and so on and so forth.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Chromium Compile (v56)

Our new compilation test uses Windows 10 Pro, VS Community 2015.3 with the Win10 SDK to combile a nightly build of Chromium. We've fixed the test for a build in late March 2017, and we run a fresh full compile in our test. Compilation is the typical example given of a variable threaded workload - some of the compile and linking is linear, whereas other parts are multithreaded.

Our popular Chrome Compile test gives a good showing for the Intel CPUs, however the higher-powered Core i9 processors perform a lot better here - up to 50% in fact. Part of this is down to memory; the DDR4-2666 C19 memory is slower than the DDR4-2666 C16 used in our Core i9 reviews. However, there might also be a case for power draw - the BIOS defaults for the Core i9 processors allow for a lot more power consumption, which the Xeon W processors might not be able to tap in to. It is worth noting that the W-2155 wins against the W-2195, showing that in this test frequency matters as much as cores.

SYSmark 2014 SE: link

SYSmark is developed by Bapco, a consortium of industry CPU companies. The goal of SYSmark is to take stripped down versions of popular software, such as Photoshop and Onenote, and measure how long it takes to process certain tasks within that software. The end result is a score for each of the three segments (Office, Media, Data) as well as an overall score. Here a reference system (Core i3-6100, 4GB DDR3, 256GB SSD, Integrated HD 530 graphics) is used to provide a baseline score of 1000 in each test.

A note on context for these numbers. AMD left Bapco in the last two years, due to differences of opinion on how the benchmarking suites were chosen and AMD believed the tests are angled towards Intel processors and had optimizations to show bigger differences than what AMD felt was present. The following benchmarks are provided as data, but the conflict of opinion between the two companies on the validity of the benchmark is provided as context for the following numbers.

PCMark 10: link

PCMark 10 is the latest all-in-one office-related performance tool that combines a number of tests for low-to-mid office workloads, including some gaming, but focusing on aspects like document manipulation, response, and video conferencing.

In the Physics score, the W-2195 takes a commanding lead, however the W-2155 is not far behind, offering a better performance per dollar metric. Both are outclassed by the Threadripper 1950X in this test, however.  In fact, the only test where Xeon W truly wins is in the Creation test.

GeekBench4: link

GB4 is a popular tool in benchmarking, with most users liking its cross-platform functionality. Due to requests, we are including the data in our reviews. Our benchmark database has a more detailed breakdown of the sub-sections in the test.

GeekBench 4 is still a newer benchmark in our test suite, hence the lack of comparative results.

PCMark8: link

Despite originally coming out in 2008/2009, Futuremark has maintained PCMark8 to remain relevant in 2017. On the scale of complicated tasks, PCMark focuses more on the low-to-mid range of professional workloads, making it a good indicator for what people consider 'office' work. We run the benchmark from the commandline in 'conventional' mode, meaning C++ over OpenCL, to remove the graphics card from the equation and focus purely on the CPU. PCMark8 offers Home, Work and Creative workloads, with some software tests shared and others unique to each benchmark set.

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