[Darth-Apple]

Very nice thread. I refrained from replying right away so that the first few posts would be yours in the thread. You've divided it up in sections (I wish there was a way for thread authors to re-arrange posts so that updates showed up at the beginning). I benchmark pretty much everything I touch, so I always love seeing benchmarks of various other hardware. Especially when the process is documented (as opposed to random Geekbench Browser reports, where someone could be running a web page that's hogging an entire core during the bench mark, for all we know. )

I have noticed that with dual channel RAM, there is very rarely any significant performance improvement EXCEPT for gaming. In anything graphically intensive, it's usually very heavily bottlenecked by the RAM for integrated graphics. Outside of that, it's usually only a few percent of an improvement, which is worthwhile nonetheless, but not necessarily "noticeable."

Memory performance matters though. AMD server chips, for example, have smoked Intel even on a lot of single threaded tasks now, but some tasks are still very behind for AMD chips. This is largely because AMD's latency to access main memory is significantly larger. Yes, they have more cache, but if it's not in cache at all, Intel can access it faster.

Very nice work overclocking as well. Especially on a laptop.