Media encoding and rendering

Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9

LAME MT MP3 Encoding

Cinebench 10

Valve Particle Simulation benchmark

Notes

In our conventional media encoding and rendering tests, the added cache present in the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 allows it to shave some time off common tasks such as encoding a 200MB 1080p WMV-HD file with Windows Media Encoder, or a 200MB WAV file into a 128 bit rate MP3. The most substantial gain we saw though was in Cinebench 10, where the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 ran 8% faster than the QX6850. However, there is one SSE4 app

SSE4 Testing

To see the impact SSE4 can have on performance, we loaded up the latest build of VirtualDub and DivX. In this test we use VirtualDub to convert a 300MB file into DivX. The beauty of this test is we can toggle back and forth between SSE2 and SSE4 with the Core 2 Extreme QX9650, allowing us to see the potential of what these new instructions can bring when the app is coded properly. As you can see, the results are pretty substantial, shaving a full minute off our time when SSE4 is enabled: 3 minutes, 11 seconds versus 4 minutes and twenty seconds! You can also compare the Yorkfield SSE2 results with the Kentsfield QX6850 results to see how much of an impact the larger cache plays on performance.