Benchmark Results: Productivity
Adobe Photoshop and 3ds Max are the only two tests in our System Builder Marathon benchmark suite that can take full advantage of the former build’s extra two cores. Because both tests are so well-threaded, our overclocked Ivy Bridge-based platform cannot even match Sandy Bridge-E's baseline performance. Give the old machine an overclock, and it simply pulls away from the quad-core competition.
These two benchmarks together make 15% of our performance average, so we have no fear of regression.
The previous six-core build barely edges out the new four-core machine in average file compression performance.
ABBYY FineReader uses all six of the Q1-machine’s CPU cores, but not as efficiently as the first two metrics on this page. The result is diminished scaling, reflected as smaller-than-expected performance deltas.