X-bit labs

Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 Dual-Core CPU Review (page 9)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 05/17/2005 | 09:19 PM ]

Digital Content Creation

This test emulated the user’s work in the following applications: Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.50, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek LightWave 3D 7.5b, Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f.

Since most applications from the list above support multi-threading, Pentium Extreme Edition 840 again shows no impressive results. It evidently lacks clock frequency limited by the power and heat dissipation requirements.

In this test we have an image rendered by 3ds max 5.1 into a bmp-file, while the user is preparing web-pages in Dreamweaver MX. Then the user renders some 3D animation into vector graphics format.

In fact, we have a good example of several applications supporting multi-threading running in parallel. This use of Intel’s dual-core processor resources finally brings some worthy result. Pentium Extreme Edition 840 turns out faster than Pentium 4 and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition with only one physical core. However, the low core clock of the dual-core Intel CPU prevents it from catching up with the dual-core competitor from AMD.

Now the test is emulating the user’s work in Premiere 6.5, when he is creating a video movie in raw-format from a few other movies and separate sound tracks. While waiting for the operation to be completed, the user is also modifying and saving to the hard drive a picture in Photoshop 7.01. When the video is finished, the user does the necessary editing and adds special effects to it in After Effects 5.5.

Just like in the previous test, Pentium Extreme Edition 840 proves faster than any single-core testing participant, but again falls behind AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+.

Here, our hypothetical user extracts from the zip-archive the web-site content and at the same time opens an exported 3D vector video in Flash MX. Then the user modifies it by adding some new pictures and optimizes it for faster animation. The final video with applied special effects is then compressed with Windows Media Encoder 9 so that it could later be broadcast via internet. The created web-site is then composed in Dreamweaver MX, while the system is scanned for viruses with VirusScan 7.0.

It is for the third time in a row that we obtain the same result with a few multi-threaded tasks running in parallel. Pentium Extreme Edition 840 runs pretty fast here, although its relatively low clock frequency doesn’t allow this CPU to compete successfully with the dual-core competitor.

The tests we performed in this part of our session show that dual-core processors could be quite efficient for digital content creation and processing. The CPUs prove especially efficient when we have some other tasks also running in the background. However, to be fair we should say that Pentium Extreme Edition 840 is still performing slower than AMD Athlon 64 X2 in all the carried out tests. The new Intel processor evidently lacks higher clock rates.