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.

The Lynnfield processors' strong showing continues in WorldBench, which is in many ways a world apart from the gaming tests on the previous pages.

Productivity and general use software

MS Office productivity

Firefox web browsing

Multitasking - Firefox and Windows Media Encoder

WinZip file compression

7-Zip compression and decompression

Note that 7-Zip is a new addition to our test suite and not part of WorldBench. As the results indicate, this application is very nicely multithreaded and shows us the true potential of our multicore and multithreaded processors. Here's another case where the Core i7-870's Hyper-Threading separates it cleanly from the Core i5-750. Without HT, the i5-750 performs about like the Phenom II X4 955.

Nero CD authoring

We've long known the Nero test was limited by disk controller performance as much as anything, and that has long been a problem for AMD chipsets. This time around, rather than use AMD's problematic AHCI driver, we opted for the Microsoft AHCI driver built into Windows 7, instead. We've found that driver to offer higher throughput than AMD's, at the expense of some additional CPU utilization. True to form, the AMD systems' Nero scores are much better than they've been in the past, relatively speaking, with the exception of the Phenom II X2 550, which doesn't have an extra core to give to the cause.