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:
WinRAR + Doom 3
If not for dual cores, we would expect about 50% performance loss (if we assume that WinRAR would chew up half the CPU). As you can see below, we lost roughly a third of the performance, so having two cores did help.
| Doom 3 by itself | Doom 3 + WinRAR | % performance loss |
| 20x133 2.66GHz 533FSB | 104.2 | 69.6 | 33.2% |
| 19x192 3.64GHz 768FSB | 145.0 | 92.7 | 36.1% |
| 18x205 3.69GHz 820FSB | 150.9 | 98.2 | 34.9% |
WinRAR + LAME
We have a different story when we run WinRAR and LAME at the same time. We get almost no performance loss for LAME, so we are really seeing the benefits of dual cores here.
| LAME by itself | Lame + WinRAR | % performance loss |
| 20x133 2.66GHz 533FSB | 14:08 | 14:24 | 1.9% |
| 19x192 3.64GHz 768FSB | 11:23 | 11:40 | 2.5% |
| 18x205 3.69GHz 820FSB | 10:12 | 10:18 | 1.0% |
Yes Virgina, dual core can help. Sometimes a lot.
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