How To: Get A 4 GHz Dual-Core For $120

Application Benchmarks

Processing time for scanning ZIP and RAR archives for viruses improves with the overclocked processors, but it doesn’t change considerably.

Cinema 4D uses whatever processing power is made available, so it benefits greatly from the increased clock speeds of the Core 2 Duo E7200. The overclocked 3.4 GHz chip smoked the Core 2 Duo E8500 despite the 50 percent difference in L2 cache capacity.

Photoshop CS3 also benefits considerably from the overclocked processors if you have to apply lots of filters. In our benchmark scenario, we apply six filters to a 69 MB TIF image and processing time decreases from 1:56 at 2.53 GHz to 1:18 at 3.8 GHz.