TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding

This time around, our 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 grabs first place, followed by the Athlon 64s. In this case, it appears that the 3.6 GHz Prescott has won due to sheer clock speed alone. Bringing up the rear are the two 2.8 GHz Pentium 4s. When we enable multi-threaded encoding, both dual-core chips drop their encoding times by around half. With this new facet added to the testing, the Pentium D 820 suddenly takes second place, followed by the HyperThreaded 3.6 GHz Prescott. As is the trend we and others have always noted, the Pentium 4 thrives in rendering and multimedia encoding thus far. A properly multi-threaded application makes it a walk in the park for the Pentium D 820.

LAME MP3 Encoding

LAME is a purely single-threaded application, as can be seen by looking at these results. The Pentium 4 560 with its sheer clock advantage takes the top spot, followed by the Athlon 64s. The remaining two Pentium 4 parts follow close behind.

As I talked about in the X2 4200+ review, I was originally planning to test a multi-threaded implementation of the LAME MP3 encoder alongside our regular single-threaded one. Had it not been for the anomalous results, I would have included the numbers here. Both single- and dual-core processors were scoring identically with this multi-threaded version of LAME. I have not yet received word from the author as to the reason behind this.

WinRAR

WinRAR's built-in benchmark mixes up the bag a considerable amount. Firstly, not even the sheer clock advantage of the 3.6 GHz Prescott allows it to come anywhere close to winning this time. The single-cored 2.2 GHz Athlon 64 manages to beat it by a handy ~70 KB/s. Far behind that, we have the regular 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, and even a bit farther behind is the Pentium D 820. WinRAR is a particularily memory bandwidth-intensive application, and it is clear to us that the results have almost exactly mirrored our SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth test results.

Our previous conclusion continues to hold true. Single-threaded applications see absolutely no gain in performance, whereas well-designed multi-threaded ones see close to a 100% increase in performance. The Pentium 4 falls behind in memory bandwidth-intensive applications, as could be seen with our WinRAR test results. Now comes the fun stuff ...