HOW WE TEST

Computeractive is owned by Dennis Publishing, which owns a hi-tech facility for testing the latest technology. You’ll often read references to our benchmark testing, which is a method of assessing prproducts using the same criteria. For exexample, we test the speed of every PC and the battery life of every tablet in exactly the same way. This makes ouour reviews authoritative, rigorous anand accurate.

Dennis Publishing also owns ththe magazines PC Pro, Computer Sh Shopper and Web User and the wewebsites Expert Reviews ( www. ex expertreviews.co.uk) and Alphr ( www. al alphr.com). This means we can test ththousands of products before choosing ththe most relevant for Computeractive.

If you’re running simplele tasks on a very basic processor, multithreading will always help. By supporting four threads across theireir twtwo cores, Intel’s low-end i3 processors (pictured top) show much better results than if they were plain dual-core. At the high end, multi-threaded i7 processors (pictured above) can show big gains over single-threaded i5s, but only in tasks that work them hard – mostly in creative programs, such as video editing. If you run several demanding programs at once, more cores will help. Even if you’re not overtly doing more than one thing, Windows’ own background tasks often benefit from more cores, making your PC feel faster.