Media encoding

Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9

DivX Converter

LAME MT MP3 Encoding

Cinebench 9.5

Notes

Intel’s Core 2 Duo E6400 excels in our media encoding tests, with the E6400 finishing 13 seconds ahead of the X2 4600+ in WME 9, while MP3 encoding is 18 seconds faster than the 4600+. The most dramatic difference between the X2 4600+ and the C2D E6400 is seen in our tests with DivX converter, where we convert a 1080p WMV-HD video into DivX format. Here the Core 2 chip finishes nearly 1 minute ahead of the 4600, in fact, Core 2 Duo E6400 even outperforms AMD’s FX-62 CPU!

The one test where AMD’s 4600+ does manage to come ahead is Cinebench 9.5. Our guess is that AMD’s clock speed advantage allows it to perform so well here. The more senior Core 2 Duo chips are able to stay ahead of the AMD CPUs in part due to their higher clock speeds and also their 4MB L2 cache.