i7 Sandybridge over rated?

[88 King]

I'm doing some Handbrake conversions on two machines. One is the 2011 imac with the i7 2600 processor and the other is a laptop with 1.3GHz i3 Sandybridge ULV processor.

We know the i7 is a quad core with Hyperthreading at 3.4GHz with power consumption of 95W maximum.

The i3 2357M is a dual core with Hyperthreading at 1.3GHz with power consumption of 17W maximum.

Under Windows 7, the average fps for the i7 is 56 and for the i3 is 19 fps. I find hard to believe the near top of range desktop i7 is ONLY 3 times faster than the slowest Sandybridge ultra low voltage mobile processor.

Both machine is convening the identical batch of videos into same format and have enough RAM, 12GB for the imac, 6GB for the laptop. The CPU usage for both machine is near 100%, I'm not sure if the i7 is in turbo mode, but the i3 don't have that option.

Anybody else think its strange the i7 performance in Handbrake is so "poor" compared to the slowest Sandybridge processor?

 

[macmastersam]

Just because this is intel's highest-end sandy bridge processor doesnt mean that It is The fastest, nor the quickest.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html

The link above gives you benchmark data for all CPUS, from highest to lowest in CPU scores. You will be pretty surprised by your findings.

So yes, it is overated. A lot.

 

[The-Pro]

The CPU usage for both machine is near 100%, I'm not sure if the i7 is in turbo mode, but the i3 don't have that option.

Turbo mode only activates when 1-4 threads are used. At 100% CPU usage it means that all 8 threads are being used, and are clocked at 3.4GHz

 

[iSayuSay]

And how much do you think is the reasonable performance of i7 should?

How many times i7 should be faster than i3?

Clock to clock: i7 3.4GHz with 4cores & HT already encodes 3x faster than i3 1.7GHz with 2cores & HT. Twice the clock& cores with thrice performance

Price: i7@3.4GHz is not even 3x costs more than i3 ULV while i7 already give you 3x less time for encoding. So i7 is give some bang for your bucks.

So? How is that bad and overrated?

 

[corvus32]

It's not overrated.

If its so overrated, then tell us when Intel is going to release a processor that's over 300% faster than the i7 2600 with similar TDP numbers and price? That's the performance gap your talking about with the i7 2600 and the i3 2357M, and you're calling it overrated. Well, it won't be anytime soon I can tell you that much.

 

[Hellhammer]

Turbo mode only activates when 1-4 threads are used. At 100% CPU usage it means that all 8 threads are being used, and are clocked at 3.4GHz

There is one multiplier (100MHz) Turbo when all the cores are used.