Apart from benchmarks, we use certain utilities just to check on the performance of the CPU in everyday, routine tasks. Let us see how the CPUs performed.

dBPower Tests

In the following graph, you can see how the CPUs performed while encoding the same audio file into different formats. For this we used a whole music CD with a size of 750MB. We ripped the AudioCD using EAC and then encoded from one format to another with dBPower. The times needed for each task are given below.

In almost all cases, the Intel CPU performed better than the AMD. Sometimes, with small differences (WMA to MP3) and sometimes with a significant margin (WMA to WAV). The AMD CPU did better with MP3 to WAV and WAV to Mp3 with minimal time differences. The greatest difference was in WMA to WAV conversion where the Intel CPU is much faster.

The settings for dBPower were the same for both CPUs. Analytically:

DVD Shrink Tests

Compressing a movie from DVD9 to DVD5 is a very common task. For this reason we ripped an original movie using DVD Decrypter. Then, with DVD Shrink we compressed it in order to fit on a DVD5 disc. The size of the original movie was 6.85GB and we made it 4.463GB. Below you can see how many frames per second each CPU can process and the total time needed for the encoding.

In the Deep Analysis test, it's "the higher the better", meaning that the Intel CPU did better than the AMD in this task as it managed to analyse more fps than the AMD in the same time margin, while in the second task of the test, that of encoding, it is a case of "the lower the better" with values in seconds and once more, the Intel CPU managed to perform better than its AMD rival.

DivX Tests

Another very common task is to convert a movie into DivX format. For this we used a .vob file of size 202MB and with FlaskMPEG, converted it to .avi. The settings are given below:

The 3000+ managed to complete the encoding faster than its Intel rival. Though this may seem a small difference of a few seconds, remember that we used a 200MB video. What would it be if we have used the whole Vob file? The time differences would be significant.

WinRAR Tests

Using a folder with 101MB of various data, we checked how much time each of the CPUs needed to compress and extract it.

Compression and extraction of files seems to be a job the AMD does better... 101MB extracted in 12sec...