Results: Audio And Video
Although budgetary limitations commonly hamper my ability to procure tweaking-friendly hardware, I still managed to squeeze an extra 400 to 600 MHz from last quarter’s Core i5-3470, depending on how many cores were active. And earlier, the modest stock cooler and AMD 970-based motherboard were enough to push an FX processor to 4.0 GHz, yielding a meaningful speed-up in threaded applications. Unfortunately, the current machine is at a major disadvantage, since its Core i3 processor can't overclock at all.
In our single-threaded iTunes and LAME MP3 workloads, the Haswell architecture running at 3.4 GHz is fast enough to match Ivy Bridge at 3.6 GHz.
The Hyper-Threaded Core i3 is no match for four physical cores in our more demanding transcoding benchmarks, though.