Cinebench 11.5
Cinebench is one of the few standardized tests that can really shake and bake a CPU. It also takes full advantage of extra cores and threads. Let’s see if that’s true with our band of merry CPUs.
As we can see, our results from this test clearly show that the brute strength from SiSoft SANDRA and encoding tests in PCMark Vantage reflect what we’re seeing here. The more cores you have, the faster your rendering gets completed. You can also see the Turbo CORE technology kick in for the single core tests, taking three of the CPUs on the X6 to 3.6Ghz, while the X4 sits at 3.4GHz. The OpenGL tests are clearly hitting the wall with the HD 5570.
Adobe Premiere Pro CS4
One of the things that sees the most benefit from extra cores is video rendering. It also has the most to gain because it can literally shave hours off a big project. We’ve taken the project files that created this video on our YouTube Channel and have used it to compare the performance of our CPUs.
It’s a definite no brainer. If  you want to shave a bunch of time off your video projects, you will want to pick up the new Phenom II X6 1090T. Considering that we’ve already shaved four minutes off our rendering times over the X4 and over 11 minutes over the X2, on a three minute and forty-three second video, you can imagine how much time could be saved on longer video projects.
Now that we’ve done some work, it’s time to play some games.
Heaven Demo v1.0
The Heaven Demo by Unigine gives us the ability to see how well extra cores can contribute to games like MMORPGs and apps that have large immersive worlds. The Heaven Demo also allows us to compare performance from OpenGL to DirectX 11 and everything in between. We’ve chosen DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 to compare for the purpose of our tests.
It looks like more cores are good, but it seems that any more than four cores is not providing any benefits. If you play WoW, you might be OK hanging on to your X4.
World in Conflict (DirectX 10)
Real Time Strategy (RTS) games like World in Conflict not only have detailed graphics, but also a lot of units on the screen controlled specifically by the CPU. These games typically do benefit from more cores. Let’s see if that’s true.
As we can see, even a whole bunch of cores won’t help this game out. Though it seems that extra cores up to four does give a distinct advantage over two cores, six cores does nothing. A more powerful GPU is needed here. Let’s see if a DirectX 11 RTS game sees any benefit from the extra cores.
Battle Forge (DirectX 11)
Battle Forge is another RTS title that should benefit from extra cpu cores. Let’s see if that’s true.
Based on the results, it looks like the four faster cores in the X4 965 are of some benefit over the multiple slower cores of the X6 1090T. The X2 is clearly out matched here.