Navigate: Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home	.	.
Prices: Mainboards ABIT ASUS Chaintech Shuttle Soyo Tyan CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ Search Prices:

LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: A Higher Bus Frequency Test Configurations Memory Subsystem Power Consumption 3D Rendering Energy Efficiency Cinebench AV Encoding: DVD-Shrink, DrDivX, MainConcept AV Encoding: Virtualdub / DivX and SSE4 Gaming: 3DMark '06 FarCry F.E.A.R. The Down and Dirty Dis-Illusions Give Us Some Feedback on this Review
Intel's Yorkfield QX9770 at 3.2 GHz I have the Power!!
(Review by Michael Schuette, November 25, 2007)

Audio Visual Content Creation and Media Encoding

Virtualdub / DivX 6.7 and SSE4 Instruction Set Improvements

Virtualdub 1.7.1 and higher with DivX 6.7 are optimized for SSE4 instructions to provide a significant performance gain over encoding in SSE2 mode. A 66 MB mpg file was converted to AVI format using the DivX 6.7 CODEC. For comparison, we ran the same workload in 4 or 6 different settings in the case of the Conroe/Kentsfield or Yorkfield core, respectively.

The CODEC settings were specified as Experimental SSE4 full search set to:

Disabled                   

Enabled using SSE2

Enabled using SSE4
with Enhanced multithreading enabled or disabled for each mode.

All data shown were acquired using the ASUS P5K3 with DDR3 running at the highest memory frequency supported for any given CPU - depending on the host bus frequency specification of the processor. Since the memory runs in syncronous mode at its fastest setting, the 1333 MHz processors (333 MHz bus clock) were capable of taking advantage of the same memory frequency, whereas the 1067 MHz CPUs (266 MHz bus clock) were running DDR3 at 1067 MHz data rate and the P4 840 Extreme Edition accessed the memory at 800 MHz. All runs were done in WindowsXP SP2 and replicated in Vista 64 Ultimate Edition with no difference in the outcome between operating systems. For comparison, data from the QuadFX system using two AMD FX74 processors in Vista 64 Ultimate Edition are shown.

MPG to AVI conversion

Encoding time in seconds: lower is better!

Enhanced multithreading provides a 3-5% performance increase primarily on quad-core systems. We were a bit surprised by the performance hit seen when enabling "Experimental SSE4 Full Search" so we contacted Intel to ask what's this all about. According to the information we received, Experimental SSE4 Full Search uses different algorithms for the encoding which result in better quality, in other words, the workload is higher. With respect to the resulting DivX File size, the difference is negligible, with respect to encoding quality, we looked and looked and to the best of our capabilities, we were not able to see any difference either. Interestingly also, the FX74 system performs best using SSE2 mode with enhanced multithreading enabled

Yorkfield vs. Yorkfield

Encoding time in seconds: lower is better! EM+: Enhanced Multithreading Enabled / Disabled. The darker bars give the numbers for the QX9650, the lighter bars those for the QX9770.

Since we can't really see any advantage of running in SSE4 mode other than showcasing the technology, we give the detailed results for the two Yorkfied offerings in each of the six encoding modes. On average, the QX9770 is slightly faster.

(BX80557E6300)

next page: => Gaming Performance: 3DMark'06 =>