AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 & 3800+: Socket 939 Has Arrived

Name: AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 & 3800+: Socket 939 Has Arrived - Page 6
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, June 01, 2004, 12:01 AM EDT

Next, we did some video encoding with all ten of the test systems. To get these scores listed below, we took a standard MPEG 2 format video clip and converted it to DivX format using version 5.1.1 of the CODEC with XMPEG v5.03. The results below are reported in Minutes : Seconds. Lower scores equal better performance.

XMPEG 5.03

Digital Video Encoding

There is only a 17 second spread separating the "slowest" and "fastest" systems, but the Athlons had a clear performance advantage in the XMPEG test. The new Socket 939 FX-53 and 3800+ were roughly 10% faster than the fastest Intel system (the 3.4GHz Prescott), with the 3.2GHz Northwood and Prescott bringing up the rear.

Windows Media Encoder 9

More Digital Video Encoding

We continued our testing of the Socket 939 Athlon 64 FX-53 and 3800+ with another video encoding benchmark using Windows Media Encoder 9. In this test, we took a 416MB Digital Video file and encoded to WMV9 format. Once again, times were recorded in Minutes : Seconds, with lower times again indicating better performance.

The Windows Media Encoder benchmark loves memory bandwidth, which is why the Athlon 64 3400+ couldn't quite keep pace with the other test systems. As you can see in the graph above, the Intel based systems had a clear advantage in this benchmark, with even the 3.2GHz Northwood matching the performance of the AMD's Athlon 64 FX-53. WME9 is also multi-threaded and SSE optimized, so this is what most likely explains Intel's lead in this application.

Tags: AMD, Athlon, SoC, socket, fx, arrive, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, Ive, AR, AM, K

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com