Benchmark Results: Productivity
Because 3ds Max is optimized for multi-core processors, AMD's quad-core Phenom II makes quick work of Intel's dual-core CPU aided by Hyper-Threading. At any given price, you're going to find that workstation-oriented applications will run better on AMD's chips, which generally enable more physical cores than Intel's entry-level models that include fewer processing resources.
Overclocking helps the March PC complete 7-Zip first, but the other file compression jobs are completed quicker on the current machine’s Core i3-2100.
The 3.4 GHz Phenom II X4 outpaces the other tightly-grouped configurations in both Photoshop and ABBYY FineReader. The two applications are also threaded, thus proving AMD's point that physical cores trump Hyper-Threading in software able to exploit them.
