![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, January 07, 2009
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
AMD Phenom II X4 Model 940 Black Edition Processor
We have been waiting for this CPU, but hardly with bated breath. While we had high hopes, the Phenom II is already waning in enthusiast circles. We pit it against the Intel Core 2 Quad and Intel Core i7, clock for clock. Isn't that what we really want to see?
Application Benchmarks
Outside of gaming and encoding, there are few applications on the desktop that will push our systems to their limits. This especially becomes apparent when we start talking about multi-core processors that are the norm now days. Some encoding apps are really starting to shine and become usable by the masses.
The benchmarks below all represent very real world situations just like you would run into at home while encoding video from your camcorder - or while using a picture editing program - or while encoding music for your iPod - or making movies with something as simple as Windows Movie Maker - or encoding a DVD for saving it to your hard drive to allow you easier access to the content.
We have simply timed our various tests on the different systems and supplied you with the amount of time it took for the system to fully build the file. Scratch disks were used properly as well as making sure we were not bumping into any IO bottlenecks elsewhere.
Be aware, these are NOT benchmarks, rather real world applications and the results shown would be very much in line with what you would see at home using these systems.
LAME 3.98.1
This represents a full hour long .wav file being encoded to .mp3 at LAME default settings. So instead of an album taking 2 minutes to encode, it take about 3. Who really cares?
WinRAR v3.80
This is a 560MB set of files being compressed. Again our Phenom II lags behind our Core 2 while the Core i7 just whips all. WinRAR is sensitive to memory bandwidth as well as CPU giving our Core i7 its cushy lead.
All the following encoding applications represent encoding a 40 minute DVD movie in .vob format.
DivX Converter
While DivX Converter is billed as a multithreaded application, it is pretty poor in that department. Again we see the Phenom II slight trail the Core 2 and get owned by the Core i7.
Videora IPod Converter v4.02
This application will let you encode movies to your iPod. It is heavily multithreaded and does a good job of utilizing all available threads. Our scaling is not as extreme here, but the Phenom II lags the Core 2 by half a minute and the Core i7 by well over a minute.
TMPGEnc 4.0 XPRESS v4.6.2.266
Again we see the same pattern with TMPGEnc, which happens to multithread very well.