Science Mark 2.0 is an attempt to put the truth behind benchmarking. In an attempt to model real world demands and performance, SM2 is a suite of high-performance benchmarks that realistically stress system performance without architectural bias. Science Mark 2.0 is comprised of 7 benchmarks, each of which measures a different aspect of real world system performance.

Pov-Ray s a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports. We used Pov-Ray 3.7beta15 for all tests, since it supports Dual Core CPUs. We used the build-in benchmark as suggested from developers.

Two different benchmarks are displayed with different results. In Pov-Ray, the Intel XE6800 is 88.26% faster than the AMD X2 4600+, while the Intel E6600 is 52.73% faster. Looking at the ScienceMark results, AMD's memory architecture helps it achieve a high score of 1368.93. The Intel XE6800 is only 20.25% and the Intel E6600 only 3.18% faster.

- Nero Digital

Nero Digital is one of the most well known Digital formats, offering both ASP and AVC encoding.

For our tests, we used the latest version of Nero Recode v2.3.1.8 as packaged with Nero Reloaded v7.5.0.1. As a source, we used a VOB file of 5mins duration. We encoded in two modes for each processor (ASP, AVC) with exactly the same preferences (same bit rate and dual pass). The encoding time displayed below, is what Nero Recode reported. Obviously, the lower the time taken, the better. All results are displayed in seconds.

Video encoding is a demanding task and Intel's XE6800, as was expected, offers the highest possible performance. With the AVC profile, it is 30.65% faster than the AMD 4600+, while the Intel E6600 is only 11.72% faster in the same test. With the ASP profile, performance differences are similar (30.87% for the XE6800, 15.65% for the E6600).