Benchmarks: EVEREST, SuperPI, WinRAR
EVEREST Ultimate Edition reports lower memory bandwidths than before and the performance trends also seem to change. The Phenom X4 9950 no longer looks impressive when compared to the Core 2 processors, delivering a similar memory bandwidth to that of the Core 2 Quad Q9650. What did remain consistent was the dominating performance of the Core i7 processors, which overwhelmed both the Core 2 Quad Q9650 and Phenom X4 9950.
Super PI is an old favorite and the 32MB calculation generally takes quite some time to complete, though that is assuming you are not using a new Intel Core i7 processor. The Core 2 Duo E8600 was slightly faster than the Core 2 Quad Q9650 in this test thanks to its slight clock speed advantage. The Core i7 920 made the same calculation in just 13 minutes and 22 seconds, effectively shaving off over 2 minutes. By the time we reached 3.88GHz on the Core i7 965 Extreme Edition we were almost making the 32MB calculation within 10 minutes.
Despite being clocked 670MHz per core slower than the Core 2 Duo E8600, the Core i7 920 was actually 100KB/s faster in the single thread test. When looking at the multi-thread performance the Phenom X4 9950 was able to defeat the Core 2 Quad Q9650 with a throughput of 1567KB/s. This figure would be trumped by the Core i7 920, which delivered 76% more performance. Then the Core i7 940 was another 10.5% faster than the Core i7 920.