Systemax Endeavor Xeon Workstation
LAME MT and Windows Compression
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Now we’re getting into the real-world testing—the types of usage models you’d see with some hands-on time with the Endeavor. First up is LAME MT a threading-aware encoding application used to convert a .wav file into .mp3 format. Naturally, this is going to be another processing-intensive metric that scales according to clock speed and the number of cores you throw at the project. For our purposes, we used a 622MB copy of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
For the discrepancy in frequency and front side bus speed, Systemax’s Endeavor fares well enough against our reference config. It still takes more than a minute longer to finish the task of turning .wav into .mp3. As a clear play on value, at least, the Endeavor does its job remarkably well.
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Next up, we measured the time it took for Windows to compress a 500MB folder of music, movies, Web pages, and documents of various sizes. On the Endeavor, we performed the test on its RAID 0 array, where higher theoretical I/O throughput would show off the machine’s higher-end storage subsystem.
Windows compression nevertheless favored brute processing strength over disk performance as Systemax’s Endeavor took 20 seconds longer to cram our test folder into a .zip file.
