Core i7-2600K Overclocked: Speed Meets Efficiency

Benchmark Results: Audio/Video

If you crank up the clock speed you will see a direct impact in iTunes 9 immediately.

The simlar result can be found with the Lame MP3 encoder. The same workload, encoding the Terminator 2 soundtrack CD into 160 kb/s MP3 format, can be accelerated from 1:26 to only 1:07. Keep in mind that this application does not take advantage of multiple cores.

We could save a quarter of the processing time when converting MPEG-2 video into H.264 format by overclocking the Core i7-2600K from 3.4 to 4.5 GHz. The charts always show +100 MHz. For example, it reflects 3.5 instead of 3.4 GHz base clock speed. This is because Turbo Boost could always maintain +100 MHz above the rated clock speed on our test system.

MainConcept shows similarly strong performance gains.