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 For our real-world application testing we have selected Microsoft Excel 2007, which will be using a rather complex spreadsheet to gauge the performance of each configuration. Something worth pointing out here is that the AMD Phenom II X4 965 is the best performing processor in this test, which is not something we were expecting to see. The Phenom II X4 965 is able to complete the test within 11 minutes, along with the Core i7 960 and 870 processors. The Core i5 750 is considerably faster than the Core 2 Quad Q9650, shaving just over 2 minutes off the completion time. This made the Core i5 750 roughly the same speed as the Core i7 860 and 920 processors in this test, which is impressive.  Using WinRAR we measure the time it takes to compress certain files. For the first test we compress the entire Windows 7 installation to a single file and measure the time it takes. A similar thing is done for the second test, though here we compress just a single large 12GB file. The Core 2 Quad Q9650 for example took 14:57 minutes to compress the Windows 7 installation and 67:54 minutes for the 12GB file. The Core i5 750 processor is able to improve on the performance of the Core 2 Quad Q9650 considerably, taking just 9:52 minutes to compress the Windows 7 installation and 42:50 minutes to compress the 12GB file. The Core i7 920, 870, 860 and Core i5 750 processors all took at least 42 minutes to compress the 12GB file, while the Core i7 960 did it in just 37:33 minutes.  Using a high resolution image we measure the time it takes for each processor to apply two Photoshop filters, the smart blur and extrude filters to be precise. Again the AMD Phenom II X4 965 processor is surprisingly fast, as it applied the smart blur filter the fastest. That said, it did struggle with the extrude filter, though it is just a second and a half slower than the Core i7 920 processor. The Core i5 750 matched the Core i7 860 processor, which is impressive given that it lacks Hyper-Threading technology and its clocked 140MHz lower. The Core i7 870 performance is also impressive, as it is only a fraction slower than the Core i7 960 processor. |
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