Results: Rendering And Productivity
All of the tests on this page are fully optimized to utilize multi-core (and even multi-processor) configurations.
As usual, Blender distinguishes itself as a best-case scenario for the Core i7's Hyper-Threading technology. The rest of these applications also register a benefit from a processor that can schedule more than four threads, achieving various degrees of utilization from Intel's Haswell architecture.
If you use a lot of higher-end professional apps, many of which are sped up substantially by parallelism, the premium on Intel's flagship CPU family might be money well-spent. Having said that, overclocking the Core i5 does help make up ground, evidenced by Visual Studio, especially.