Benchmarks: Productivity
The performance difference between high-priced and low-cost systems is typically huge in 3D Studio Max, and much of it is due to the different number of processing cores. The $1,500 system again looks like a top value, until one considers that it would take over 16 hours to produce a one-minute animation at 30 frames per second (and only 13 hours for the $4,500 build).
Adobe Photoshop isn’t getting any advantage from the $1,500 system’s added cores. Our custom benchmark doesn’t work with our $4,500 system’s 64-bit operating system, though the program itself does.
WinRAR finds a much greater performance advantage from four cores than Winzip does, at least in our evaluation. These results fly in the face of respondents who had previously told us the opposite would be true.