Tom's Hardware's 2007 CPU Charts

Audio/Video Benchmark Results

Audio Encoding

In this benchmark, we took an ordinary audio disc (Terminator 2 soundtrack) and imported it into Apple iTunes 7, using high quality settings and a 160 kb/s bitrate. Although iTunes clearly is thread-optimized, it cannot benefit from the additional cores when using a Core 2 quad core processor.

Lame is a native audio (WAV) to MP3 converter. Again here, we use the extracted audio content to see how fast the different processors can encode wave audio into Fraunhofer's MP3 format.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.