Single Threaded Results (*Bold indicates best score)

	840 EE	3.73 XE
Sisoft CPU Dhrystone ALU	19071	11072
Sisoft CPU Whetstone FPU/iSSE2	7944/13280	4597/7765
SiSoft MMX Integer iSSE2	46223	26749
SiSoft MMX Float-Point iSSE2	61593	35835
SiSoft Mem Int Buff'd	4951	6645
SiSoft Mem Float Buff'd	4946	6671
SYSmark 2004 ICC	285	259
SYSmark 2004 Office Productivity	161	206
PiFast	48.89	42.13
TMPGEnc	1:38	2:04
CDeX	1:38	1:25
Doom 3	90.8	110.8
FarCry	113.8	135.42
UT2004: as-convoy	79.69	95.75

Rather than commenting on each of our usual suite of benchmarks, we decided to put them all together and provide some observations. In Sisoft, with the exception of the memory tests, the Extreme Edition 840 gives the 3.73GHz Extreme Edition a severe beating. Given it's a synthetic benchmark, we aren't getting too excited about this, but it does demonstrate the fact that the dual core does pump a lot of floating point muscle. The memory set sharing does impact the ram's performance significantly, which is to be expected as the 840 does not have a dedicated bus to the memory for each core.

Things were a toss up in our application tests, as the Extreme Edition 840 proved to be very strong in multimedia applications, but less so in "office" type apps. In the gaming tests the 3.73GHz Extreme Edition easily surpassed the 840 in all the benchmarks. The differences here is not due to the architecture as much as it is in the clock speeds between the two that was the determining factor.

Multitasking Tests

Multitasking is something everyone of us does everyday. Be it downloading files while surfing the net, or encoding a DivX file while checking email. In these scenarios, most likely, the applications are single threaded but using multiple threads from the CPU. We'll get into the multithreaded aspects of applications soon enough, but we ran a number of tests in a somewhat unrealistic scenario of shrinking a DVD as explained earlier and running some benchmarks. Please refer to the previous page for the full details of our setup.

PiFast

Despite the heavy loads, we can see that the faster clocked 3.73GHz Extreme Edition is still the fastest of the bunch. We threw in a Pentium 4 540 into the mix (running on an Intel 925X) just to see how it stacks up against the Extreme Edition 840, and despite the matching clock speeds, the additional cache on the 840 helps it hold the 2nd place position.

TMPGEnc

In a single threaded enviornment, the 840 stomped on the 3.73, but loading up the CPU didn't seem to hurt the 3.73 all that much. The 840 on the otherhand took a big hit, but still held on to the lead.

CDeX

Again, clock speeds seem to matter more with current applications and multitasking.

Doom 3

FarCry

UT2004

As we can see in the gaming tests, clock speeds rule the roost as far as Intel CPUs are concerned. Both CPUs lose about the same percentage of performance, but breaking it down, the Extreme Edition 840 takes a 33% hit in Doom 3, 35% in FarCry and 30% in UT2004. The 3.73GHz XE is hit with a 28%, 29%, and 30% loss respectively.

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