Benchmark Results: Media Encoding

iTunes shows a muted difference between these systems compared to the synthetic benchmarks. The Core i5 even wins by a small margin when it comes to stock iTunes audio encoding (this makes perfect sense, given more aggressive Turbo Boost settings), although the Core i7 takes the lead when overclocked.

Note that HandBrake is a new addition to our application benchmarking suite, and we therefore have no comparative data from the previous Core i5 system.

While the TMPGEnc video encoding benchmarks using DivX and Xvid don’t seem to take advantage of Hyper-Threading (Ed.: DivX does, in fact, utilize Hyper-Threading), MainConcept Reference demonstrates a huge advantage with the Core i7 system.