Athlon II Or Phenom II: Does Your CPU Need L3 Cache?

Benchmark Results: Audio/Video

Audio Encoding

iTunes wants higher clock speed to deliver quick audio transcoding performance. Hence the small time difference we saw doesn’t come as a surprise.

We'll fairly call this one a tie.

Video Transcoding

DivX transcoding from MPEG-2 is only slightly quicker on the Phenom II X4.

Xvid transcoding benefits a bit more, although the process takes much longer than transcoding MPEG-2 into the DivX format.

MainConcept gets its performance from core count and clock speeds. There’s no noticeable benefit from the L3 cache here.