Benchmark Results: Productivity
We’re in the process of updating our test suite, so we’ve temporarily lost the AVG anti-virus and Photoshop tests (we’ll be debuting a new anti-virus metric soon, along with incorporating Photoshop CS4).
We do have the latest version of WinZip, though, which is unfortunately still single-threaded and responding almost exclusively to clock speed. The Phenom IIs scale linearly, and even the 2.83 GHz Core 2 Quad is able to outpace the 2.66 GHz Core i7 920.
The newest version of WinRAR, on the other hand, follows after previous iterations and utilizes as many threads as you can throw at it—hence the Core i7’s commanding victory.
More odd is the X3 720s parity with AMD’s X4 940—a CPU that is both 200 MHz faster and one core stronger. Nevertheless, AMD shows very well against Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q9550, besting it by 16 seconds in our 334 MB compression routine.
An upgrade to the latest version of 3ds Max 2009 (in 64-bit trim, no less), also demonstrates solid multi-threaded optimization. That Phenom II X3 720 is painfully slow here—if you’re doing rendering work, make sure you have a quad-core CPU.
The Phenom II X4 955 stands up well to the Core 2 Quad Q9550, beating it by a second. Both Core i7 CPUs turn in the fastest numbers, as we’d expect in a well-threaded test like this one.
