Benchmarks are good for reference and comparisons, but what about real life performance? For this reason, we carried out some simple tests, using popular utilities that most users run every day.

dBPower Tests

In the following graph, you can see how the three CPUs performed while encoding the same audio file into different formats. For this process, we used a whole music CD with a size of 750MB. We ripped the AudioCD using EAC and then with dBPower, encoded from one format to another. The times needed for each task are given below ( the lower the better off course :-).

In audio encoding, it seems that the AMD is much faster than its Intel counterparts.

The settings for dBPower were the same for all CPUs. Analytically:

DVD Shrink Tests

Compressing a movie from DVD9 to DVD5 is a very common task. For this task, we ripped an original movie (which we own off course :-), using DVD Decrypter. Then, with DVD Shrink, we compressed it in order to fit on a DVD5 disc. The size of the original movie was 6.85GB which was compressed to 4.463GB. Below you can see how many frames per second each CPU processed and the total time needed for the encoding.

The D 840 handled more frames per second than the AMD but their encoding time is almost the same.

DivX Tests

Another very common task is to convert a movie into the DivX format. For this, we used a .vob file sized 202MB which was converted to .avi with FlaskMPEG. The settings are listed below:

In DivX encoding, the AMD 4200+ was slightly faster than the D 840.

WinRAR Tests

Using a folder with 101MB of various data, we checked how long each of the CPUs needed to compress and extract the entire folder.

In file compression, our simple test reports that the 4200+ is faster than either the D 820 or D 840, while in decompression the D 840 was faster by 2 seconds.