DDR2 > DDR3?!?!

Dunno what is going on here but just realised something while idling my time away. The scenario is two PCs with different configurations (yeah I know its unfair)

PC1 (2011)	PC2 (2009)
Intel Core i3 550 3.20GHz 4GB DDR3@1333 Dual Channel Intel Q57 Exp chipset Intel HD Graphics 500GB SATA Win7Pro 32bit SP1	Intel Core2Quad 6600 2.40GHz 4GB DDR2@667 Single Channel MCP73 chipset nVidia 6600 (on board built in) 750GB SATA Win7Pro 32bit SP1

PC1 WPI score

PC2 WPI score

Using just Win7 Performance Information, its funny to see the older PC beat the newer one on two important aspects. Obviously with four cores, the C2Q do more calculations per second whilst the i3 only has two cores and creates 4 threads through HT but in real-world use, the cores beat HT anytime (especially in rendering, simulation and graphic/image processing). SATA harddisk scores are equal (both running same Win7 image so no software differences). Graphic scores are not comparable since one is using on board graphics whilst the other is using on-die GPU (Note: PC2 scores with a nVidia 9200 was 7.0 for both catagories... but I shorted that card out and haven't replaced it yet)

Whats weird here is that the DDR3 memory running at twice the frequency AND in dual channel mode is thwacked by the DDR2 by a large margin! Somehow the Q57 chipset on the newer Dell PC may be limiting the performance ... it IS a budget motherboard anyway (it only has two SATA, two RAM slots ... nothing else! All other headers were removed). So getting a new PC with a newer CPU doesn't necessarily mean better performance.