Results: Productivity And File Compression
ABBYY FineReader, Blender, and 3ds Max are all optimized for threaded architectures, which is what our cheaply-built $1600 machine’s Core i7 offers. But the Maven Pure Custom still beats our Core i5-based $1200 gaming PC.
We’ve seen this type of result in Visual Studio before, but I've never been able to figure out the exact cause. In this case, it’s probably related to the RAID driver, as I believe former application-specific performance problems were also found on some “Intel Enterprise Storage”-loaded machines.
WinRAR and 7-Zip seem to think that the $1600 machine’s Core i7 is great, placing the Core i5-based Maven Pure and our own $1200 machine on-par. WinZip EZ breaks the back of our $1200 machine, and only its builder could tell you why.