Core i7-980X: Do You Want Six Cores Or 12 Threads?

Benchmark Results: Office And Archiving

PDF creation using Adobe Acrobat and PowerPoint 2007 shows no real benefit through Hyper-Threading. Either there's more than enough processing power for this type of workload, Acrobat simply can't take advantage of it, or there's a bandwidth issue caused by the large source file size.

Hyper-Threading shows great benefits with the archiving tool 7-Zip.

WinRAR is thread-optimized, but not heavily. We found that having Hyper-Threading enabled is actually a disadvantage, as the compression of our test archive is faster when Hyper-Threading is disabled on the Bloomfield and the Gulftown processors.

WinZipP hasn't yet been optimized to take advantage of multiple cores, which is obvious if you look at the processing time. The workload was the same as that used with WinRAR.