2CPU has posted part 1 of a interesting article series that compare Single VS Dual processors in a real-life environment. Here a snipped:

Finding benchmark programs that would bench a dual-processor system has not been an easy task. With SiSoft´s newest release of Sandra, it seems to be just the beginning of such apps being available. But even with that, it didn't seem to be enough. Having no other SMP benchmarking software readily available, I turned to a good friend of mine, and asked him to design something using Kinetix' 3D Studio Max 3.0. Thanks to my good friend Kent Truscott, we now have something that can push our processors around, and give us something to measure performance with.

What Kent has designed for us was a simple wood fire, with light effects, and a floating-rotating 2CPU.com above it. For those of you that want to try rendering this on your system, the file is only 220 KB in size before rendering, and blows up to a whopping 13.4 MB AVI file. Of course, you will need 3D Studio Max to do this (sorry!), and hopefully as SMP benchmarking programs become available, we will all be able to use the same stuff. For now, this will have to do.

Check it out