Benchmark Results: Productivity
The new $2600 PC tears through Photoshop and 3ds Max roughly 50% faster than its predecessor. That's a good sign that the core count increase is being taken advantage of. Not even last quarter's overclocked configuration can stand up to our new setup at its stock settings in these first two tests.
None of our file-compression utilities are well-threaded, yet the most commercialized of these has the worst CPU support. At substantially similar overclocked frequencies, our new six-core PC even falls behind the old quad-core chip in WinZip. A little birdie tells us that the next version of WinZip will take advantage of available compute resources more readily though, so we're eager to see what Corel has in store.
ABBYY FineReader enjoys somewhere around 45% better performance from a 50% increase in core count when both PCs are set to similar overclocks.
