MAXON CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's animation software, CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation.

MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such and Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. MAXON CINEBENCH runs several tests on your computer to measure the performance of the main processor and the graphics card under real world circumstances. The benchmark application makes use of up to 16 CPUs or CPU cores and is available for Windows (32-bit and 64-Bit) and Macintosh (PPC and Intel-based). The resulting values among different operating systems are 100% comparable and therefore very useful with regard to purchasing decision-making.

The CineBench R10 benchmark uses all four cores of Intel Q9300 therefore, it can render faster the test image, aproximately x2 times faster. In single core tests, the E8600 is much faster.

- x264 HD Benchmark

x264 Benchmark utilizes the next generation of Video Encoding benchmarks with support for x264 codec that is considered to be one of the most demanding for Video applications. Simply put, it is a reproducible measure of fast your machine can encode a short, HD video clip to a high quality x264 video file. It's nice because everyone running it will use the identical video clip and software. The video encoder (x264.exe) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other.

The benchmark procedure is very simple, you just run a batch file that encodes the same file four times. Two different results are presented, one for the first pass and another one for the second one. The average performance is illustrated in the table below.

The x264 HD benchmark really tests the cpu, since it uses 100% of it. As was expected the Intel Q9300 is faster by almost 30% compared to the E8600.

- TMPGEnc 4 Xpress

TMPGEnc came from Tsunami MPEGEncoder. Encoding time will automatically be faster as CPU speed gets faster! TMPGEnc converts *.AVI files to MPEG1, the format which is used in VideoCDs. Using a variety of options in TMPGEnc, you can compress your video file in high quality. TMPGEnc enables you to adjust bitrate, quantize matrix, GOP structure, interlacing and many other parameters so that you can create the most appropriate movie file depending on your needs.

For our test we use an AVI file sixed 350MB encoded with Xvid (Mpeg4 ASP) codec. We use the build-in Mpeg4 ASP/AVC MediaEncoder profile and by dividing the total frames via needed encoded time, we get the average frame/sec speed of each processor.

The TMPGEnc 4 Xpress agve us some interesting results. With ASP encoding, the performance of the Intel E8600 is very good, since the ASP encoding doesn't use all four cores of Q9300. However when we selected the AVC profile, the performance boost we got by the Q9300 was big enough to justify its retail price.