System Builder Marathon, Sept. '09: $1,250 Enthusiast Build

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Application Benchmarks: Productivity

We've seen this before. Curiously, AVG doesn't care much for clock speed, but it sure does favor multiple threads. Memory and disk speed are also likely factors in this atypical result.

WinRAR will show more gains from overclocking, as we can see here. Also, the overclocked Phenom II is still having trouble reaching the i7's stock performance.

WinZip shows us a close race, indicating that it isn't making use of the i7's eight logical cores. The overclocked Phenom II does well here, beating the stock i7-920 by a notable margin.

Don Woligroski
Contributor

Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.