WorldBench
WorldBench's overall score is a pretty decent indication of general-use performance for desktop computers. This benchmark uses scripting to step through a series of tasks in common Windows applications and then produces an overall score for comparison. WorldBench also records individual results for its component application tests, allowing us to compare performance in each. We'll look at the overall score, and then we'll show individual application results alongside the results from some of our own application tests.

The Socket AM3 processors prove to be a little disappointing in WorldBench compared to their rivals from Intel. The E8400 opens up a big lead over any AMD product, in fact.

Productivity and general use software

MS Office productivity

Firefox web browsing

Multitasking - Firefox and Windows Media Encoder

WinZip file compression

Nero CD authoring

Through the MS Office, Firefox, and multitasking tests, the Socket AM3 processors look to be very competitive. In fact, the Core 2 Quad 8200 has a much rougher time, finishing dead last in two of the three tests. However, the Phenoms suffer when we get to the WinZip and Nero tests, both of which tend to rely on disk controller performance to a degree.

Those are the breaks in these days of "platformization." AMD's entire lineup of south bridge chips for several years has had trouble with a key performance feature, Native Command Queuing for Serial ATA. Turning on NCQ can improve performance in these tests, but it comes at the cost of higher CPU utilization, which hurts performance in other tests—most notably, in WorldBench's Photoshop test.

For this review, we've included results with AHCI (and thus NCQ and SATA hot-swapping) disabled, at AMD's request, for all Phenom II processors. (The Athlon 64 and original Phenoms were tested with AHCI enabled.) When we disabled AHCI, we found that performance in Photoshop rose and performance in Nero and other tests dropped by offsetting amounts; the overall WorldBench score was unchanged.