Multitasking Benchmark
In our final benchmark, we're going to do things a little differently. We're going to measure Crysis benchmark performance during the creation of a .RAR file and this should show us the game performance we can expect out of these processors for multi-tasking applications.
These results are interesting in that we can see that the Core i3 processors take a much harder performance hit during multitasking usage models compared to true quad-core options. Indeed, even the budget Athlon II X3 445’s performance is close to that of the Core i3 when running concurrent applications. This is likely because Hyper-Threading isn't as effective as an additional physical CPU core when multiple threads are executed. It's an interesting experiment, and in this case, the Phenom II X4 940/945 shows a definite advantage over all of the other sub-$150 CPUs.