In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME is an open-source MP3 audio encoder that is used widely in a multitude of third party applications.
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| Lame MT Benchmark |
| Audio Transcoding on the CPU |
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For this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file (a mile-long Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application, in both single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.
The Surface Pro 3's higher CPU clocks give it a slight edge here over the HP Spectre X360 in this audio encoding test. In comparison to the XPS 13 though, HP's latest offering does very well in the single-threaded test and finishes only a second behind in the multi-threaded test.
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| Cinebench R11.5 |
| 3D Rending On The CPU And Integated GPU |
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Cinebench R15 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of processor resources and is an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.
The HP Spectre X360's CPU performance was right in-line with the XPS 13 in the Cinebench multi-threaded CPU benchmark. The Spectre X360's OpenGL performance was slightly better, however, most likely due to newer drivers and the clean software installation on the machine.
