Media encoding and rendering

Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9

LAME MT MP3 Encoding

Cinebench 9.5

Notes

AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-74 falls just three seconds behind the Core 2 QX6700 in our video encoding tests with Windows Media Encoder 9, while the X6800 and FX-70 finish in a dead heat. We use the Microsoft compiler for our LAME MT MP3 encoding tests, here Intel’s Core 2 CPUs excelled. We noted previously that LAME MT doesn’t take advantage of quad-core processing, which helps explain the FX CPUs poor showing in this particular benchmark.

In Cinebench 9.5, the AMD FX-74 system nosed just ahead of the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, running 4% faster. Cinebench is one of the few apps we’re testing here today that takes advantage of multi-threading, and it shows, as all of the quad setups deliver significantly improved performance over the dual-core CPUs.