Results: SiSoftware Sandra
The $2500 PC takes a surprisingly large win over its $1300 counterpart in Sandra's Arithmetic component. Both processors possess the same number of physical cores. However, the addition of Hyper-Threading technology allows the Core i7 to post much higher numbers in this synthetic measure of compute performance. In the real world, SMT won't have such a pronounced effect. Then again, that's why this is a synthetic, and why we don't factor most in synthetics to our overall scoring.
The $1300 machine’s CAS 11 memory defaults do a good job of keeping up with the $2500 machine’s CAS 8 XMP configuration, though overclocking makes the big difference.
Unable to operate any faster, the $650 machine’s dual-channel memory controller is stuck at a still-good 20 GB/s.