AMD Phenom II X2 555 BE & Athlon II X4 635 & X3 440 Processors

x264 HD Benchmark:

x264 is a free library for encoding H264/AVC video streams. Tech ARP has a nifty benchmark app to bring some automation and standardization to the encoder. Simply execute a batch file and it will run three tests using two different encoder versions. We are only reporting the newest version since its scores are a little better. This is multithreaded and maintained very high CPU usage, especially during the second pass.

Windows Media Encoder 9 - x64 Edition:

Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Edition is free from Microsoft and is yet another multithreaded app. The conversion was actually a two pass process, but WME only reports a final time. The first pass doesn't fully utilize all CPU power, but the second pass comes pretty close to full utilization. For this test we used a 10 Min / ~130 MB video to re-encode to the 2Mb/s DVD quality format.

Divx Encoder:

Divx (and Xvid) are extremely popular video formats, offering high compression and excellent quality. For this test we used the same 10 Min / ~130 MB video to re-encode to the "Home Theater" setting for the encoder. The encoder is multithreaded but never passed 85% usage on a dual core, or 60% on a quad.