Benchmark Results: Audio/Video And Compression Programs

Apple's iTunes is single-threaded, so our effective clock rates range from 3.9 to 4.7 GHz. Naturally, adding cores does nothing for performance in this app; the only way to speed it up is to push faster overclocks.

The same goes for Lame.

HandBrake is threaded, but for every additional 100 MHz bin of frequency you give it, performance does continue to scale pretty well.

MainConcept is similarly well-threaded, though it also continues to scale as you give it incrementally-faster clock rates.

Compared with WinZip and WinRAR, 7-Zip is both more efficient and faster. In the above chart and each of the following two, we're compressing the same amount of data. But because it does its job so efficiently already, overclocking doesn't affect the performance of 7-Zip as significantly as either of the other compression apps.

WinRAR, though well-threaded as well, enjoys a nice speed-up from our overclocking effort.

WinZip, which isn't as well-threaded, naturally sees more of a gain due to higher clock rates, though it still takes longer than the other tools to complete our workload.