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Test System

[CPU] Intel Core i7 4790K
[GPU] Gigabyte GTX 970 mini-ITX
[MOB] Gigabyte Z97-D3H (F7 bios)
[RAM] G. Skill Trident X 4GBx2 DDR3 @ 2400 MHz 10-12-12-31 2T
[HSF] Noctua NH-U12S

Windows 7 64-bit with Service Pack 1
GeForce 355.82



Test Methodology

For productivity testing, I only used HandBrake. The short movie (about 10 minutes long) Big Buck Bunny was encoded from AVI to MP4 using High Profile preset. Video resolution is 1080p. Only the first 2 minutes of the video was encoded to shorten the benchmarking time. Big Buck Bunny is an open movie which was created using open software. You can download the movie here https://peach.blender.org/about/

Gaming performance will be measured by using FRAPS to record the frame times. For those who are new to frame times, it is the measure of time taken to render a frame and its unit is milliseconds (ms). The lower the frame time, the better. The 99th percentile frame time is a measure of the overall "smoothness" of game play. For example, a 99th percentile frame time of 20ms means that 99% of the frames were rendered within 20ms. A more detailed explanation of frame time benchmarking can be found here http://techreport.com/review/21516/inside-the-second-a-new-look-at-game-benchmarking

Only Crysis 3 was used because it is more CPU-intensive than Witcher 3 and Grand Theft Auto V. For those who want to replicate my gaming benchmark, check the YouTube link below to see what part of the game I benchmarked. The settings used for each game are also indicated below. The game is updated to the latest version as of September 11, 2015.

Crysis 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX1S4aSJ3lU
Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Texture Resolution: Very High
Anti-aliasing: SMAA T2X
System Spec: Very High



Performance Results

The results below are the average of 3 runs

[IMG


In HandBrake, Hyper Threading gives about 20% more performance. It scales linearly. However, it is very different when it comes to a CPU-intensive game. With Hyper Threading enabled, the 99th percentile frame time increased by 39.5% when going from 4.4 GHz to 3.2 GHz. Disabling Hyper Threading increased the 99th percentile frame time by 61.8% when going from 4.4 GHz to 3.2 GHz. This just shows that thread count matters more than CPU frequency in CPU intensive games like Crysis 3.​