X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU Review (page 8)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/09/2006 | 09:01 PM ]

Audio and Video Encoding

When both leading CPU makers introduced their dual-core solutions the overall picture in the applications dealing with the media content encoding has become slightly different. This is what we see in the benchmark above: dual-core processors from AMD cope better with MP3 files encoding than their rivals from Intel.

Athlon 64 FX-60 also outperforms Pentium Extreme Edition 955 in the new version of the DivX codec featuring quality multi-threading optimization. However, the advantage is pretty small in this case. So, when we overclock both CPUs, the laurels go to the new leader.

XviD codec doesn’t support multi-threading yet. Therefore, when we use this particular codec, the dual-core CPUs use only 50% of their potential.

However, the Windows Media Encoder that creates two computational threads during work allows dual-core processors to really show their best. The leadership here belongs to AMD (Toledo), which remain unattainable for Pentium Extreme Edition 955 even when it is overclocked to 4.26GHz.