Intel brought back a nice feature of the past to Core i7 series, which is the Hyper-Threading Technology. With HT, Core i7 is able to handle 8 software threads on 4 cores. We have spent some time to see if the Hyper-Threading on the Core i7 processors actually helps in improving performance. Using the X58 platform and HD 4850X2 card, we checked out Core i7 performance on 3DMark Vantage, CineBench 10, Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2 with and without Hyper-Threading.
Intel brought back a nice feature of the past to Core i7 series, which is the Hyper-Threading Technology. With HT, Core i7 is able to handle 8 software threads on 4 cores. We have spent some time to see if the Hyper-Threading on the Core i7 processors actually helps in improving performance. Using the X58 platform and HD 4850X2 card, we checked out Core i7 performance on 3DMark Vantage, CineBench 10, Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2 with and without Hyper-Threading.
|
HT Off |
HT On |
% Difference |
|
| 3DMark Vantage CPU |
15374 |
20617 |
+ 34.1% |
| Crysis Warhead |
119.59 |
118.72 |
– 0.7% |
| Far Cry 2 |
176.78 |
167.90 |
– 5.0% |
| CineBench 10 |
13617 |
15875 |
+ 16.6% |
Certainly, 3DMark Vantage loves to have more threads as we can observe a significant boost on the CPU score. As for Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2, we saw a small drop in FPS when HT is enabled. On the 3D content creation part, CineBench 10 registered a neat boost of about 17% when HT is enabled. Overall, HT is good for numerous applications out there that are multi-threaded but we aren’t seeing any benefits for the latest games out there now.
3DMark Vantage – HT Off
3DMark Vantage – HT On
Crysis Warhead – HT Off
Crysis Warhead – HT On
Far Cry 2 – HT Off
Far Cry 2 – HT On
CineBench 10 – HT Off
CineBench 10 – HT Off
