Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
Converting an entire feature-length movie soundtrack to Apple format in under a minute is something only an ultra-fast processor can accomplish. Unfortunately, the poorly-threaded program probably would have reached the same performance level using an air-cooled i3 processor at the same clock speed.
Leave it to independent programmers to develop a transcoder that actually works--as previous dual-core system reviews have demonstrated, HandBrake’s threading looks superior to that of our other video-encoding programs. Converting a 1GB video file to MP4 in less than 5 minutes strikes us as an excellent use for all that excess processing power.
TMPGEnc encoding times look about the same today as they did six years ago, though changes in the DivX codec might be responsible for that lack of progress. On the bright side, overclocking boosted its performance by 68%.
MainConcept gets a smaller boost of around 47% through overclocking, making us a little more curious about how well the less-expensive systems will compare.