Benchmark Results: Productivity
Autodesk 3ds Max 2012, ABBYY FineReader, Blender, and MS Visual Studio 2010 all seem to concur that an Ivy Bridge processor is particularly potent, even in the threaded metrics where we'd expect to see the FX excel. It's probable that memory and storage are factoring in to the outcome as well.
A combination of half as many cores, no Hyper-Threading support, and significantly lower clock rates put Paul's $500 machine at an almost-75% disadvantage in these benchmarks optimized for higher-end machines.