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

dBPower Tests

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

Depending on the file type, the Intel P4 660 was faster in some cases while the AMD in others. MP3 seems to be handed better mostly by the AMD processor while WMA by the Intel 660.

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 reason 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 and we made it 4.463GB. Below you can see how many frames per second each CPU can process and the total time needed for the encoding.

It's amazing how many fps the 660 can handle. The encoding time is also very low. The whole project with the 660 took us not more than eight minutes!

DivX Tests

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

Encoding with the 660 is much faster than with the 530, if we consider that the tested .vob file was only 202MB. However, compared to the time the AMD needed, it was not that much faster.

WinRAR Tests

Using a folder with a variety of data of 101MB capacity, we checked how many times each of the tested CPUs needed to compress and extract it.

The AMD proved to be the fastest in the compression task, while it needed more time to extract the files than the Intel CPUs.