What is typically seen as one of the more important performance figures we'll generate during this review are the real-world content encoding numbers. Although typically budget buyers don't expect as much in terms of video encoding performance as those who purchase high end chips, but we should still be able to expect reasonable audio encoding rates. First up is MP3 encoding; we used the LAME codec, set to "insane" quality. We encoded a 200MB WAV file, and timed it with dBPowerAMP's encoding utility.

Here the XP and Mobile chips are neck and neck with the original XP just eeeking out ahead.

System Performance

PCMark04 can be used to determine an estimated system performance overview. While not using actual retail code from mainstream apps like SYSmark and ZDBench do, it does use *parts* of those programs to determine performance. Performance levels in the following applications are considered:

File compression
File decompression
File encryption
File decryption
Virus scanning
Grammar check
Audio conversion
Image processing
Web page rendering
WMV video compression
DivX video compression
Physics calculation and 3D

Here now we see the XP pull away from the pack in this test of real world system performance more than likely due to it's higher FSB and memory sync setting.

PC Mark also comes with a CPU benchmarking component which we've thrown in just for fun.

Results pretty similar to the first PC Mark test but with a bit more breathing room this time between the competitors.

Next Page: (Gaming Performance)

Page 1: Introduction Page 2: SiSoft Sandra Page 3: Content Encoding, PCMark Page 4: Gaming Performance Page 5: Number Crunching Page 6: Rendering, Overclocking, Conclusion