Intel's Core i7 870 & i5 750, Lynnfield: Harder, Better, Faster Stronger

Microsoft Excel 2007

Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.

The Excel test is peculiar in its results. It must be one of the few situations where Bloomfield's memory bandwidth advantage is seen as even the Core i7 870 can't outperform the i7 920. The Core 2 Quad Q9650 does well thanks to its large 12MB L2 cache, as does the Q6600 with a beefy 8MB cache.

Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation

Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spend encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.

Hyper Threading is good for about 4% here, giving the 920 the slight edge over the Core i5 750.

Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation

Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.

The i5 750 pays the HT penalty, taking another 20 seconds to render our test video than the i7 920. It is still faster than the Phenom II X4 965 BE at a much lower cost. The Core i7 870 comes close but can't beat the i7 975.