AMD Athlon 64 FX-60: A Dual-Core farewell to Socket-939

Media Encoding Performance using DVD Shrink, WME9, Quicktime and iTunes

First up is DVD Shrink 3.2.0.15. Our test was simple - we took a copy of Star Wars Episode VI and ripped the full DVD to the hard drive without compression, effectively giving us an exact copy of the disc on the hard drive.  Then, using the copy of the DVD on the hard drive (to eliminate any DVD drive bottlenecks), we performed a DVD shrink operation to shrink the movie to fit on a single 4.5GB DVD disc.  All of  the options were left on their defaults, so the test ends up being pretty easy to run and reproduce.  The scores reported are DVD encoding times in minutes, with lower numbers meaning better performance. 

The DVD Shrink test is quite important as DVD Shrink is quite possibly one of the easiest tools to rip a DVD.  The easier a tool is to use, the more likely it's going to be used, and arguably the more important performance using it happens to be. 

AMD closed in on the Extreme Edition chips with the FX-60; however, the performance advantage still belongs to Intel's 955. Media Encoding has always been a strong point for Intel's NetBurst architecture and it remains as such even today.

Moving on, we have our Windows Media Encoder 9 test, which uses the advanced profile settings for video encoding.  We left all settings at their defaults and just proceeded with a MPEG-2 to WMV-HD conversion.  The values reported are in frames per second, with higher numbers being better.

The FX-60 achieves a virtual tie with the Pentium Extreme Edition 955, outperforming the X2 4800+ by almost 9%.

Next up, we have Quicktime Pro 7.0.3 and we perform a MPEG-2 to H.264 encoding task.  All of the settings are left at their defaults, with the exception that we optimize the output file for download with a 256kbps data rate while leaving the resolution untouched.  We also adjust the video options to optimize for the best quality.  We report the transcoding time in minutes, with lower values being better. 

AMD continues to dominate in our Quicktime H.264 encode test. We asked Intel why the Pentium 4/EE weren't very competitive here and they mentioned that Quicktime appears to still be using a lot of x87 floating point code in favor of SSE2 optimized code that would run far better on Intel's architectures. Regardless, it is a worthwhile benchmark since not all applications are as heavily SSE2 optimized as Media Encoder.

Finally, we have a MP3 encoding test using iTunes 6.0.1.3.  For this test, we simply took a 304MB wav file and converted it to a 192kbps MP3 file, measuring the encode time in seconds.  The only iTunes option that we changed was to prevent the playback of the song while encoding. 

Once more, we see the FX-60 on top, completing our encode test 4 seconds quicker than the X2 4800+.