AMD Sempron 2800+ & 3100+ Review
XMPEG & Windows Media Encoder 9
Another good way to evaluate a processor's performance is to run it through a series of video-encoding tests. Video encoding is extremely CPU-intensive, proving to be a good assessment task for overall system performance. In the next two segments we ran a series of common encoding tasks and timed the complete process. During the first test, we utilized XMPEG to encode a 110MB MPEG to AVI. The second test used Windows Media Encoder 9 to convert a 416MB AVI to a WMV file.
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Video encoding is one of the most demanding tasks a user can instruct a machine to do. In this case, the advantage was clearly in favor of the Pentium 4-based test beds, partly because of the P4's Hyper-Threading capabilities. You'll see the widest gap with the 2800+, which trailed by 16 seconds, while the 3100+ narrowed the deficit to six seconds.
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Performance with Windows Media Encoder displayed a similar trend to the XMPEG results. Here, the Sempron 2800+ lagged behind the Pentium 4 by 23 seconds, completing the test in just under four minutes. Once again, the 3100+ narrowed the gap, this time by eight seconds.
