Overclocking: Core i7 Vs. Phenom II

Benchmark Results: Productivity

Update: After getting back from CES, we were bothered by the fact that the Phenom II was originally outperforming Intel's Core i7 920 in this one test, despite testing and re-testing before heading to Vegas. Thus, we tore the X58-based platform completely down and built it back up using the same Windows Vista install, with all of its benchmarks installed. Sure enough, our scores changed dramatically in 3ds Max, yielding the result above.

Thinking this could have been some sort of throttling issue, we tweaked the setting on and off , yielding no variation in performance.

Our anti-virus test again shifts the tide in favor of Intel’s Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.8 GHz. AMD’s Phenom II lags the i7’s time by 53 seconds.

We’ve demonstrated in the past that the WinRAR benchmark is very much optimized for threaded environments, and it seems to benefit from the i7 920’s four physical cores with Hyper-Threading, finishing our compression metric 58 seconds faster than the overclocked Phenom II.

Winzip is optimized for a pair of threads, so this test isn’t making full use of either CPU’s available execution resources. With that said, the Core i7 micro-architecture still does significantly better in this metric.