Application Benchmarks: General Usage
The virus scanner benchmark might best reflect how the average user spends CPU cycles on a computer.
AVG Antivirus shows us some wonderful performance gains with multiple CPU cores. A PC's performance can slow to a crawl while a scan takes place, but these results show that multiple cores can assume more of the load while shortening scan times.
WinZip and WinRAR show almost no multi-threading enhancements. WinRAR does have the edge with an apparent ability to at least take advantage of two cores, but no more than that.