Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
A single-threaded metric, Lame naturally reflects the best performance from the highest-clocked, most efficient architecture. But because Turbo Boost pushes these CPUs so fast when only a single thread is active, they mostly turn in very similar results. Only the lower-clocked Core i5-3570T lags behind.
The same story applies to iTunes, another single-threaded app. Slight tweaks to the Ivy Bridge architecture even allow a couple of Core i5s to outperform Core i7-2700K.
Once we switch over to a more threading-optimized test, the results fall back to what we saw in the content creation apps: Hyper-Threading gives the Core i7s a nice little boost, while the quad-core i5s file into place accordingly. Again, the only chip that lags back is the Core i5-3570T.
HandBrake tells us a similar story.