Application Benchmarks
When it comes to serious Excel spreadsheets we see a significant difference in performance between the old Core 2 series and the newer Core processors. In fact, even the Core 2 Quad Q9650 couldn't beat the Celeron G1820, which was 12% faster. The Core 2 Quad Q9650 was also 3.5x slower than the Core i5-4690K, while the E6600 was almost 7x slower.
The Sandy Bridge Core i5 and Core i7 processors were impressively fast, losing out to the newer Haswell models by slim margins. Even the first-generation Core processors held their own, though the Core i5 760 was 32% slower than the Core i5-4690K.
The 7-zip results are interesting. This time we see the Celeron G1820 sitting between the Core 2 Duo E8600 and E6000, that said it is closer to the E8600 in score. Meanwhile the Pentium G3220 is much faster than the E8600 but considerably slower than the Q6600.
It took the i3-4350 to take out the Core 2 Quad Q9650, while the i5-760 and 2500K were faster again. The i7-870 matched the i5-4690K and the 2700K was quite a bit slower than the 4790K.
Heavy Photoshop users likely already have the latest and greatest hardware, but we were interested to see how much of an improvement the newer Intel processors offer over their predecessors.
The fastest Core 2 Quad processor, the Q9650, took 74.1 seconds to complete the workload making the lowly Celeron G1820 a little over 40% faster. The i3-4350 was also slightly faster than the i7-870, surprisingly, and the i5-4690K offered similar performance to the i7-2700K.
Abobe Illustrator CC really only utilizes a single thread and for that reason Intel's latest Haswell Core processors deliver the best performance.