Intro
I haven't seen a good recent comparison of Hyper-Threading recently, and I haven't seen one that adds tessellation into the mix either.
So I decided to make a quick comparison to show people the performance difference on standard usage of HT on vs off and tessellation on vs off. By "standard usage" I mean, I never turned any processes off, I ran it like I would a normal game with MSN Messenger, etc and antivirus running in the background.
The benchmark used was Unigine Heaven 2.1. The settings were as follows (except for tesselation which was either Disabled or Extreme for each graph below):
The specs used are in my sig, but just in case they change in the future I will add them here.
Test system (my Gaming PC)
CPU: Intel Core i7 920 D0 @ 3.5GHz 1.2v
RAM: 3 x 2GB Corsair XMS3-1600 @ 1656MHz 6-7-7-20-60 tRFC 1T
Motherboard: ASUS P6TD Deluxe (BIOS 0501)
Graphics: 2 x HIS Radeon HD 5870 1GB @ 850/1200MHz
HDD: 160GB Intel X25-M SSD
PSU: CM Real Power 850w Modular
Sound: ASUS Xonar D2X
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate (x64)
CPU Cooling: Corsair H50
Results
Conclusion
Is Hyper-Threading worth it? According to those graphs it has virtually no effect on standard usage. However, using something CPU-intensive in the background would be logical to enable it as you WOULD see performance gains. All-in-all, it depends on how you want to use your processor, even if you aren't using anything CPU-intensive in the background, it does give you a small boost to minimum FPS. But when you take into account the complaints of heat and increased power-consumption that have been talked about, the benefits are not worthwhile.
Edited by DataMatrix - 6/5/10 at 1:13pm
I haven't seen a good recent comparison of Hyper-Threading recently, and I haven't seen one that adds tessellation into the mix either.
So I decided to make a quick comparison to show people the performance difference on standard usage of HT on vs off and tessellation on vs off. By "standard usage" I mean, I never turned any processes off, I ran it like I would a normal game with MSN Messenger, etc and antivirus running in the background.
The benchmark used was Unigine Heaven 2.1. The settings were as follows (except for tesselation which was either Disabled or Extreme for each graph below):
The specs used are in my sig, but just in case they change in the future I will add them here.
Test system (my Gaming PC)
CPU: Intel Core i7 920 D0 @ 3.5GHz 1.2v
RAM: 3 x 2GB Corsair XMS3-1600 @ 1656MHz 6-7-7-20-60 tRFC 1T
Motherboard: ASUS P6TD Deluxe (BIOS 0501)
Graphics: 2 x HIS Radeon HD 5870 1GB @ 850/1200MHz
HDD: 160GB Intel X25-M SSD
PSU: CM Real Power 850w Modular
Sound: ASUS Xonar D2X
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate (x64)
CPU Cooling: Corsair H50
Results
Conclusion
Is Hyper-Threading worth it? According to those graphs it has virtually no effect on standard usage. However, using something CPU-intensive in the background would be logical to enable it as you WOULD see performance gains. All-in-all, it depends on how you want to use your processor, even if you aren't using anything CPU-intensive in the background, it does give you a small boost to minimum FPS. But when you take into account the complaints of heat and increased power-consumption that have been talked about, the benefits are not worthwhile.
Edited by DataMatrix - 6/5/10 at 1:13pm
Gaming PC
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Gaming PC
(13 items) |
