Nobody is talking about games , we are talking about general computer use
What, like typing in Word, filling in a few cells in a small 50-row Excel budget spreadsheet, changing the font size of a slide in Powerpoint, listening to an MP3 in Winamp, watching a hardware-accelerated 1080p video in VLC / MPC-HC / Youtube, scrolling down the page in Anandtech or clicking "Check Mailbox" in Outlook / Thunderbird?... OMG, the difference is horrendous! LOL. Most of these don't even show up as 1-20% CPU usage of 1 core of even on a 3GHz Celeron/Pentium or 1-30% of an AMD A4, and are entirely subjective & prone to bias / placebo. In my experience unless you've got an iffy driver / virus / malware / trojan installed somewhere (or haven't bothered to remove the 40x odd "free cr*pware" apps preloaded onto many Branded laptops), most real-world "general usage responsiveness" difference is down to SSD vs HDD and massively variable ISP latency (for web browsers).
One of the most enlightening jobs I've ever had when it comes to seeing inside the human mind was working in a high-end hi-fi store dealing with those funny "superman" audiophiles every day. I remember one came in loudly and proudly dictating a several hundred dollar budget for a simple 1m twin-phono interconnect. I took two cables out - a premium $499 one, and a cheap $5 one. "
Oooh! that's MUCH better" he proclaimed after I told him I swapped them over and out came the usual buzzwords
("dynamic soundstage", "warmer tonality", "tighter timing", "superior transient response",
"diminshed jitter", etc). Thing is I didn't swap them - I just unplugged and plugged the same $5 cable back in again (out of his line of sight)... :whiste:
In another double-blind test of a group of 20 "golden eared listeners" owning setups from $2k-$10k, it turned out that none could ABX a 96khz SACD / DVD-audio from a 44.1KHz CD, only 2 could ABX a $500 cable vs a $5 cable (and they both failed with the same $500 vs a better $30 cable). 1/3rd of them however, couldn't even tell the difference between a $500 cable and telephone wire, and 2 amusingly even failed to ABX a $500 cable vs a wire coathanger. Seriously. The oldest aged 58 couldn't hear over 14khz (due to natural Presbycusis). Man did they sulk like little children when they found out. :biggrin:
Trust me, if something cannot be objectively and repeatedly measured, you can take any surrounding emotional claims of "feelings" of an expensive piece of kit you've just bought with an almighty grain of salt. Arguing over "responsiveness" at 1-20% typical CPU load on either brand or 8 vs 4 cores for general office / internet apps which use half of one core is to me, a bit like arguing over those little $50 a piece plastic pyramids that lift the cable off the carpet so you don't get "carpet interference" with your already shielded and insulated digital cable. There might be some argument for running 4x x264 encoding threads whilst applying 30x PS CS6 filters, whilst trying to play Crysis 3 all at the same time, but no-one does that in real life. That's why I included the Skyrim benchmark - it's one thing that can objectively measure "smoothness" (which is not average fps, but rather a consistent minimum fps) via fraps without bias. I suspect the reason "it doesn't count for general computer use" is simply because it gives the "wrong" answer...