AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 & 3800+: Socket 939 Has Arrived
XMpeg & Windows Media Encoder 9
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.
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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.
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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.
