AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Dual-Core
Windows Media Encoder & LAMP MP3
We continued our testing of the with a video encoding benchmark based on Windows Media Encoder 9. In this test, we ran the Windows Media Encoder 9 portion of the WorldBench 5 suite with encoding times were recorded in seconds. Lower times indicate better performance.
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Talk about a blow-out! The Athlon 64 X2 4800+ simply man-handles any other CPU in this test. Historically we've seen Intel's Hyperthreading allow for a considerable advantage in this test versus a single core Athlon 64 and as you can see, the P4 EE and Pentium 840 smoke past the legacy Athlon 64 4000+ and FX-55. However, with dual 2.4GHz Athlon 64 cores, the new Athlon 64 X2 4800+ racks up a 23% speed advantage over Intel's fastest Pentium 840 score.
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In our custom Lame MP3 encoding test, we convert a large digital audio file to the MP3 format, which is a very popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis, to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. In this test, we chose a large 223MB WAV file (a never-ending Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format. Processing times are recorded below. Shorter times equate to better performance.
Even the new 3.97 Alpha version of Lame we used for this test, favors raw clock speed (at least within a given processor architecture) and the scores scale accordingly as a result. The 2.4GHz cores of the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ are neck and neck with the 2.4GHz single core of the Athlon 64 4000+. Beyond that we see the 3.2GHz Pentium 840 bringing up the rear with no real advantage for any dual core chip apparent in this test.
