Benchmark Results: Encoding/Productivity
When it comes to audio encoding, these real-world tests are not well-optimized for the potential threading advantages Intel's Core i5 brings to the table. The overclocked Phenom II meets or beats the Core i5's performance. The overclocked Pentium's performance is impressive, but disappointingly academic, since this is the speed where the CPU failed. Nevertheless, the stock Pentium's numbers are impressive for a 2.8 GHz part.
Here we can see how dependant video encoding performance is on the codec used and its incorporated optimizations. Once again, the overclocked Phenom II matches Core i5-750 performance. The stock Pentium numbers are not at all impressive, but when overclocked we can definitely see some potential.
3ds Max is threaded, allowing the quad-core Core i5-750 to take a commanding lead. The overclocked Pentium puts up a fight, but can't reach the i5's non-overclocked performance.
Photoshop favors Intel's Clarkdale and Lynnfield designs, while the Phenom II X2 555 struggles to keep up to stock G6950 performance, even when overclocked beyond 4 GHz.
Here is where our Pentium G6950 numbers have to be left blank, as the processor died during the AVG benchmark.
The compression utilities seem to take good advantage of the Phenom II's overclock, even allowing it to best the Core i5-750's stock performance in WinZip. But the AVG virus scan benchmark shows little improvement due to the increased clock speed, something our AVG benchmark is known for.
It is in these everyday file compression applications that the Pentium G6950 shows quite poorly, unable to match the Phenom II X2 555 at stock speeds.
