Benchmark Results: PCMark 7
Although PCMark 7 is able to utilize at least 16 threads (confirmed by Futuremark), it gains far less from parallelism than it does from high clocks and an architecture able to maximize IPC. As a result, you see the thousand-dollar Core i7-990X fall behind Intel’s much cheaper Core i7-2600K.
Because Core i7-3960X incorporates the best of Sandy Bridge in a six-core configuration, it manages to eke out a first-place overall finish.
The rest of the tests also go well for Sandy Bridge-E—particularly the computation metric. Only once is Core i7-2600K able to sneak past the flagship part.
Do these results warrant spending $1000 on a new processor? Decidedly not. However, PCMark 7 centers on applications included with Windows 7, most of which aren’t as demanding as the real-world workloads that characterize the rest of our benchmark suite. So, let’s keep moving…