MP3 Encoding, WMEx64 and WinRAR Tests
LAME MT MP3 Encoding
This custom test uses the LAME MT engine to benchmark encoding a 650 MB WAV file into a standard 128 kbps MP3 file. We used the Microsoft compiler for the most fair results.
Windows Media Encoder 9 x64
This custom test uses the standard Windows Media Encoder to convert a 720p HD video file to a 2Mb CBR DVD-quality video in two passes.
WinRAR 3.70 Beta 8
Our own custom WinRAR benchmark, this test takes a large 650 MB text file and compresses it with the highest compression option.
Popular applications like LAME and other MP3 encoders are barely using two cores now so the move to eight of them doesn’t help our multi-threaded LAME benchmark at all. The Windows Media Encoder application does see a small gain in performance though of about 10% over the quad core system. WinRAR sees a dramatic slowdown in our tests though as this benchmark is very much a memory-dependent test.