System Builder Marathon, Q2 2013: System Value Compared

Results: Media Encoding

As we know well by know, Apple's iTunes is going to favor the platform running the fastest. After all, these three machines all employ Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture. More cores and cache don't help at all.

LAME is largely the same, its workload also single-threaded.

In contrast, HandBrake and TotalCode Studio extract maximum benefit from my pricy setup's Hyper-Threading technology, which employs logical cores to utilize physical resources as fully as possible.