WorldBench
WorldBench uses scripting to step through a series of tasks in common Windows applications. It then produces an overall score. WorldBench also spits out individual results for its component application tests, allowing us to compare performance in each. We'll look at the overall score, and then we'll show individual application results alongside the results from some of our own application tests.

Now that's interesting. Memory speed appears to have only a muted impact in WorldBench, where just a single point separates most configurations running at the same processor speed. The only exception is the dual-channel Core i7-920 setup, which is a full six points slower than the other 920-based systems.

Scores are very close through WorldBench's multimedia editing and encoding tests, particularly when we look at the Extreme, whose performance doesn't scale up meaningfully with faster memory. Our 920-based configurations are a little more spread out, but really too close to call, especially given that our 13x200 setup has a slightly lower processor clock than the others.

WorldBench's office and multitasking tests show a little more preference for faster memory. Both the Core i7-920 and the 965 Extreme turn in quicker times with higher RAM speeds here, although we're only talking about differences of a few seconds. With 1066MHz memory, there isn't much to be gained from an extra memory channel or tighter timings.

Much as we saw in Cinebench, Core i7 rendering performance is entirely bound by processor speed. The configs with faster memory perform a little better in the DirectX modeling test, but again, we're looking at differences of only a few seconds in a test that takes more than five minutes.

WorldBench's Nero test has proven itself to be somewhat unreliable, possibly in part thanks to Vista's propensity to aggressively pre-fetch and reorganize data on a system's hard drive. It's hard to imagine why our Core i7-920 configurations should be faster here, especially considering that we used a fresh image for each setup.

Fortunately, the WinZip results appear to be more reliable. Here we see processor speed playing a much larger role than memory, with only one exception. Our dual-channel DDR3-1066 setup is by far the slowest in this test, trailing its triple-channel equivalent by more than a minute. Keep in mind that this dual-channel config only has access to 2GB of system memory while the rest get a full 3GB.