System Builder Marathon: $625 Gaming PC

Benchmark Results: Audio/Video Encoding

Overclocking the $625 system provided a huge reduction in the time needed for iTunes to encode our 53 minute wave file to AAC. At 4.3 GHz, the time was further reduced to just 47 seconds. With iTunes being optimized for dual-core platforms, this is a perfect test for our E5200 to stretch its legs.

Overclocked results are truly impressive for audio encoding. In Lame we see another large reduction in time spent encoding the same file to MP3.

DivX performance with this machine was far better than with last month’s $500 PC, although it still was nowhere near the performance of a quad-core CPU. Both the DivX and Xvid encoders complete the job much quicker on the overclocked system than at stock speeds.

Mainconcept is another application with which our dual-core CPU will get blown away by a much lower-clocked quad-core processor, even with the impressive time reduction that overclocking offers.