The first application benchmark we ran was the media encoding suite. We started with the iTunes benchmark, which measures how long it takes the iTunes program to convert a half-gigabyte wave file to AAC:

The Q6700 finished this task on a CD-sized file in just under two minutes. Now let's try the Lame 3.98 beta 3 benchmark of the same file.

iTunes was notably quicker to encode the file, but the results are in the same ballpark.

Not much more to say without comparative data from other test systems. Now we'll move on to video encoding using TMPGEnc:

We see that the DivX encoder appears to work faster than the Xvid encoder, but that's all we can really discern at this point. So, let's move on to the DVD transcoding benchmark with CloneDVD 2:

The job is completed in just over 8 minutes.

Now that the media encoding benchmarks are complete, we will examine the image rendering benchmarks.