Intel brought back a nice feature of the past to Core i7 series, which is the Hyper-Threading Technology. With HT, Core i7 is able to handle 8 software threads on 4 cores. VR-Zone have spent some time to see if the Hyper-Threading on the Core i7 processors actually helps in improving performance. Using the X58 platform and HD 4850X2 card, VR-Zone checked out Core i7 performance on 3DMark Vantage, CineBench 10, Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2 with and without Hyper-Threading.

Certainly, 3DMark Vantage loves to have more threads as we can observe a significant boost on the CPU score. As for Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2, we saw a small drop in FPS when HT is enabled. On the 3D content creation part, CineBench 10 registered a neat boost of about 17% when HT is enabled. Overall, HT is good for numerous applications out there that are multi-threaded but we aren't seeing any benefits for the latest games out there now.