WorldBench
WorldBench's overall score is a pretty decent indication of general-use performance for desktop computers. This benchmark uses scripting to step through a series of tasks in common Windows applications and then produces an overall score for comparison. WorldBench also records 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.

Intel's Core microarchitecture excels at the sort of integer math needed for many everyday productivity tasks, and these results serve to illustrate that point. Checking in on our clock-for-clock comparison, the Core 2 Quad Q9550 outscores the Phenom II X4 920 pretty handily. Still, the Phenom IIs only trail their closest Core 2 Quad competition by a few points in each case.

Productivity and general use software

MS Office productivity

Firefox web browsing

Multitasking - Firefox and Windows Media Encoder

WinZip file compression

Nero CD authoring

Two of the benchmarks above, the MS Office and Firefox/Windows Media Encoder tests, involve simulated multitasking, with multiple applications running at once. In both of them, the Phenom II processors finish ahead of their Core 2 Quad rivals. They're also quite strong in Firefox alone. The Phenoms fall behind in Winzip, though.