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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: SMP and the New Intel Kentsfield Key Features Power Management and Cache Questions Test Setup, Benchmark Overview Power Consumption Memory System 3D Rendering: TrueSpace POV-Ray 3.7 Cinebench 2003 DVD Shrink, Dr DivX & Mainconcept H.264 Futuremarks FarCry, DOOM3 F.E.A.R. Prey, Call of Duty2 Final Thoughts Give Us Some Feedback on this Review
Intel's Core 2 Quad Extreme Edition QX6700 Codename "Kentsfield"
(Review by MS, November 1, 2006)

Media Encoding

Video and audio encoding are becoming increasingly important in the world of personal computing. Home-editing of videos and sound recordings are among the popular applications as is just the standard archiving of DVD material. In the case of audio encoding, there is relatively little out there in terms of applications that are multithreaded, meaning that they would take advantage of multiple cores. Or if there are appications like that, they are not free and the generally short conversion times achieved with free download utilities do not provide enough anguish to actually purchase potentially faster, multithreaded applications.For this article we used three applications that at least ran in the 80-85% CPU utilization when encoding audiovisual material, namely DVD-Shrink 3.2. Dr.DivX 2.0 OSS and the latest version of Mainconcept, namely H.264 Encoder.

In the case of DVD-Shrink we compressed John Grisham's "Runaway Jury" from 4,464 MB to 3.323MB, a compression to 59.6%. Dr.DivX encoded a 4.2 MB file (Watermellon.mpg) to a DivX file at Extreme Quality (thread priority: low) and Mainconcept encoded the same Watermellon.mpog file to an [H.264] High, 1920 x 1080 pixel, 29.97 fps, 48,000Hz 16 bit MPG file.

DVD-Shrink 3.2

Encoding time in seconds, lower is better

Dr.DivX 2.0 OSS

Encoding time in seconds, lower is better

Mainconcept H264

Encoding time in seconds, lower is better

One issue on the side is that in DVD-Shrink and Dr.DivX 2.0, the dual core CPUs were running at some 100% CPU utilization the entire time, whereas the quad-cores (including the Opteron 280 system) were averaging about 80% across the run. In Mainconcept H.264, even the quad CPUs were crunching at full blast - which becomes overt in the better scaling of the results.

(BX80557E6300)

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