Futuremark's PCMark benchmark is designed to measure overall system performance, and takes into account CPU power, memory, system bandwidth and hard drive speed while performing such tasks as encoding, decoding, compressing, encrypting, decrypting, etc. All other hardware being equal, any point difference should be mainly attributable to the change in processor. Using the PCMark05 tests, the stock X3 720 nearly matches the overclocked X4 9850, and easily distances it when overclocked itself.


Again, Futuremark's latest version is PCMark Vantage, which displays a much tighter spread between the four runs than we saw with PCMark05. At first glance the graph may appear to indicate a significant difference, however take into account it is only showing the top twenty percent or so of the columns. However the results are pretty much the same, the X3 720 at stock speed doesn't quite match the X4 9850 overclocked, yet easily passes it when overclocked itself.