We fire off two threads at the processor and observe how it deals with more every day tasks such as searching for contacts. So only two cores are really used in this test, but it's a strong MS office application often used...

Microsoft Office contact searching... and the Phenom II processors love it. A clear win compared to Core i7 920.

Webpage Rendering

This is a multi-threaded test we took from PCMark Vantage, we have the PC render as many Webpages (fixed) as possible. The end results are the number of Webpages created per second, something noticeable and usable in a real-world situation. Again, this is stuff that Phenom II likes very much.

WinRAR performance

One of the oldest applications in the book actually has a nice benchmark included in it. What's real nice about it is that it's pretty sensitive to system changes, such as memory. An excellent tool to have included in this memory test.

When we have WinRAR we again see that hyper-threading on Core i7 is really kicking in hard. I recently started using this test, and have not yet done QX9770 and E8500 results. So forgive me for that one. I did include an Athlon X2 7750 (2 core Phenom) to show and compare a little better.

Alright, let's move onwards to gaming applications and games themselves. We sorted out some good stuff.