iTunes likes raw clock speed and doesn’t seem to care about more than two CPU cores, demonstrating nearly identical performance with the dual-core sub-$1,000 machine compared to the quad-core sub-$2,000 machine. It responds very well to overclocking, however.
Lame shows us exactly the same thing iTunes did. These audio encoding apps really dig the sub-$4,000 system’s high clock speeds.
Video rendering using DivX and Xvid also appears to be ignorant of more than two CPU cores. The sub-$1,000 PC is showing very strong value because of this.
CloneDVD is showing us more of the same, clock speed over cores is the order of the day when rendering media with these applications.
Summary
- Introduction
- Synthetic Benchmarks
- Application Benchmarks – Media Encoding
- 2D and 3D Rendering
- Application Benchmarks – Productivity
- Game Benchmarks – First Person Shooters
- Game Benchmarks – First Person Shooters, Continued
- Game Benchmarks – Real Time Strategy
- Benchmark Summary Analysis
- Value Analysis
- Conclusion
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