Benchmarks are good for reference and comparison, but what about real life performance? For this reason, we did some simple tests using popular utilities that most users use every day.

dBPower Tests

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

The AMD 3800+ maintains its supremacy with WMA to MP3 and WAV to MP3 conversions. In all other tasks, the Intel CPUs were better.

The settings for dBPower were the same for all 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 (which we own off course :-), using DVD Decrypter. Then, with DVD Shrink we compressed it in order to fit it onto 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.

Excellent performance! Even more fps while less time was needed for the video conversion task.

DivX Tests

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

The difference of 37sec and 47sec between the P4 3.7 and the P4 660 and AMD 3800+, is significant since as we mentioned previously, the processed video file is only 202Mb.

WinRAR Tests

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

When compressing, the AMD is still faster but quite a bit slower when uncompressing...