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Dual Core Benefits

Earlier in this review, you saw Sandra CPU Arithmetic, TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding, Cinebench rendering and POV-RAY rendering show great increases due to the second processor core - sometimes closely approaching twice the performance of a single core.

But just in case that did not convince you of the benefits of dual core processors, we thought we'd give you a couple of multi-tasking results, running two different processor intensive applications.

First, let's take a look at WinRAR and Doom 3:

At stock speeds, WinRAR dropped 6.3% to 452KB/sec from 482KB/sec on the 840, and Doom 3 dropped 35.7% to 87.4fps from 135.9fps.

At the best overclocked 840 result, WinRAR dropped 4.8% from 568KB/sec to 542KB/sec, and Doom 3 dropped 35.8% from 165.8fps to 106.5fps

We can clearly see the benefit of dual cores here; with a single core we would have expected performance for both Doom 3 and WinRAR to be cut roughly in half.

And how about WinRAR and LAME MP3:

At stock speeds, WinRAR dropped only 1.25% from 482KB/sec to 472KB/sec, and LAME dropped 1.85% from 11:41 to 11:54 - so the net effect of running those two fairly CPU bound applications is less than 2% loss in performance from running each one by itself!

At the best overclocked 840 result, the difference shrinks... WinRAR performance dropped 0.18% from 569KB/sec to 568KB/sec, and LAME dropped 1.08% from 9:18 to 9:28 - basically one percent or less performance hit for running both apps at once instead of by themselves.

Dual core can rock.