Image processing and multitasking

Photoshop

Like Firefox, this Adobe Photoshop CS2 test doesn't benefit significantly from more than a couple of CPU cores. Our scatter plot shows the Core 2 Duo E8400 towering over pricier Core 2 Quads, not to mention AMD's entire Phenom X4 lineup. Here again, the E7200 and E8400 both look very well positioned.

The Panorama Factory photo stitching
The Panorama Factory handles an increasingly popular image processing task: joining together multiple images to create a wide-aspect panorama. This task can require lots of memory and can be computationally intensive, so The Panorama Factory comes in a 64-bit version that's multithreaded. We asked it to join four pictures, each eight megapixels, into a glorious panorama of the interior of Damage Labs. We've added up the total operation time to give us an overall measure of performance.

At last, an application that showcases the potential of quad-core processors. Intel's Core 2 Quads and AMD's Phenoms zoom past comparable dual-core chips in The Panorama Factory, and even AMD's slowest quad-core Phenom manages to outperform the Core 2 Duo E8400.

Where's the sweet spot here? When we take a gander at sub-$200 offerings, the Core 2 Duo E7200 and E8400 look to us like the best choices. If you want to spend more than $200, it's a toss-up between the Core 2 Quad Q6600 and the Q9300—the former being a little slower but less expensive. We'd probably side with the Q9300, despite its lower value score, due to its superior performance and higher power efficiency. More on that in a moment.

Multitasking - Firefox and Windows Media Encoder

Multitasking normally showcases the strengths of multiple CPU cores, so we're a little surprised to see the Core 2 Duo E8400 and E8500 do so well here. The E8500 may cost the same as the Q9300, but it outperforms the quad-core chip by about 13%. The E8400 looks even better, though, considering that it's nearly as fast as the E8500, costs $80 less, and ranks third in performance per dollar.