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

dBPower Tests

In the following graph, you can see how the three 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 with dBPower, we encoded from one format to another. The times needed for each task are given below (the lower, the better of course :-).

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

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 task we ripped an original movie (which we own of course :-), using DVD Decrypter. Then, with DVD Shrink we compressed it to fit it on a DVD5 disc. The size of the original movie was 6.85GB and we compressed it down to 4.463GB. Below you can see how many frames per second each CPU can process and the total time needed for the encoding.

The Intel P4 650 and 660 can process almost the same number of frames per second during the Deep Analysis while the difference in encoding time between them is only 18 seconds. In contrast, the AMD process is left far behind in this task.

DivX Tests

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

The 660 is still the fastest but the 650 follows with a small difference of only 14 seconds.

WinRAR Tests

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

When compressing, the AMD is still fastest but quite a bit slower when decompressing. Again, similar performance from the Intel processors in both compression or extraction.