Application Benchmarks: Media Encoding

Our media encoding benchmarks usually reflect our overclocking efforts very consistently as encoding is all about CPU-heavy calculations.

As usual, we’ll start with iTunes and see how long it takes to encode a 500 MB wave file into the AAC format:

iTunes shows a 37% increase in encoding speed, somehow beating out our 35% overclock by a couple of percentage points. We’re starting off strong, so let’s check out how Lame audio encoding fares with the same file, converting it to MP3 instead of AAC.

The result is, of course, similar: a 36% speed increase in encoding the file this time around.

We move now from audio encoding to video encoding applications, some of which have demonstrated bottlenecks in performance not completely attributable to CPU clock speed, but occasionally more in line with multi-threading optimization. First off, let’s scrutinize the conversion of a video file into both the DivX and Xvid formats using TMPG:

When you average these results out, you see a 31% speed increase over the stock CPU clocks. Not too shabby, and certainly within the realm of our overclock, although it should be noted that both applications have achieved slightly different performance increases from the overclock.

We now test video encoding from MPEG2 to H.264 using Mainconcept:

A similar result to be sure: a 33% performance increase with the overclock. We have seen that encoding performance closely follows clock speed increases. Now, let’s examine 2D and 3D graphics benchmarks.