Results: Audio And Video
Our audio and video encoding suite immediately highlights the strengths and weaknesses of AMD’s past and present architectures. For starters, the single-threaded iTunes and LAME workloads expose lackluster per-clock performance across the board. No surprise there, though.
That all changes as we switch to more optimized titles like HandBrake and TotalCode Studio. The sub-$100 quad-core CPUs offer big value, even before we consider overclocking.
Benefiting from a third Piledriver module, and able to execute 50% more threads simultaneously, the FX-6350 lays down impressive performance relative to the rest of the field.
Perhaps more surprising is the strength of Deneb, despite its age. Overclocked to 4 GHz, the Phenom II X4 breezes past the FX-4350 and overclocked Athlon X4 750K in all four A/V-oriented metrics.