Benchmark Results: Productivity
Adobe Photoshop surprises us with a noticeable difference between two notebooks that have the same CPU. The inability of Intel Turbo Boost in highly threaded applications hands a significant lead to the desktop processor’s higher non-boosted clock.
3ds Max 2010 shows the second notebook leading the first.
Recent versions of AVG don’t benchmark reliably.
WinRAR and 7-Zip are both highly threaded, with the use of four cores negating a benefit from Intel's Turbo Boost technology. We actually picked 7-Zip to replace WinZip because of its threading.