AMD Phenom II X4 810 Review

Page 7 - Performance: DivX and x264 compression and image operations

DivX

AutoGK is a program for recompressing all kinds of video formats with XviD and DivX codec's. Multi-threading is supported, and for the testing of the two motherboards we used an episode from Pure Pwnage, with size of roughly 300MB, while setting the program on attempting to squeeze it in 100MB DivX file.

Clearly, the AutoGK is not so well optimized for multithreading, as the author claims. While compressing only the first core is loaded at 100%, the others get about 1/3 or less. Despite this the advantages of the Core 2 architecture is undisputed, since a dual-cored Core 2 at the same frequency as the AMD Phenom II X4 shows similar results. Phenom 9850 X4 had sadly been struck down by some odd bug and when we saw that it took him a whole hour to reach 12%, we had no choice but to cast him away from any ranking positions.

Handbrake - x264 encoding

Handbrake is a software for encoding video files with x264 codec, which is very alluring due to its high background quality and small resulting file size. Handbrake is very well optimized for multi-threading and manages to load all cores fully.

What we see is a glimpse of the AMD Phenom II X4 multimedia capabilities, which in this current situation had been considerably improved from the previous processor. Paired with the right software, the new Phenom becomes an affordable and powerful choice for such operations. On the other hand Phenom II 810 is a mere 10% slower than 940, but 50% faster than 9850 X4, which has almost the same frequency.

Paint.NET x64 3.36 - PDNBench

Paint.NET is one of the best free image editors. The program is far from attempting to replace Adobe Photoshop, but for the everyday optimization and small changes of your images its doing just fine. Even more - it is an Open Source program, and that way a myriad of applications and plugins based on it or for it could be made. PDNBench is exactly that kind of plugin, performing a variety of different operations, commonly used when editing pictures - scaling, zooming, decreasing, cutting, compressing and so on. The support of multi-threading makes it even more appealing for use in this review.

Again we withes shocking difference in results between the systems. Keeping in mind that in programs such as Photoshop we do possess greater degree of freedom with operations, being not limited to these basic ones, every well paid designer, doing this for a living should consider obtaining better processor, one that will ease his daily routine. Performance between Phenom processors is proportional to their frequency, with a little edge in the improved Phenom II architecture.