Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66GHz

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by Rob Williams on April 29, 2008 in Processors

The wait for an affordable 45nm Quad-Core is now over, and the Q9450 promises to become the ultimate choice of the new offerings. It’s not much slower than the QX9650, offers 12MB of cache and as expected, has some fantastic overclocking ability. How does 3.44GHz stable sound?

Page 5 – Multi-Media: TMPGEnc XPress, ProShow Gold


Pegasys TMPGEnc XPress

TMPGEnc XPress from Pegasys is a robust video conversion tool, allowing you to input virtually any file type and exporting to a variety of formats, including standard DVD MPEG, XDVD, SVCD, HDV, DivX and a lot more. It allows basic editing functionality, such as cropping and adding filters and proves to be a great tool overall. It’s a little more expensive than most video conversion tools, but not many others include so much format support.

One of the biggest reasons for including TMPGEnc XPress in our testing is the fact that it supports a wide-range of benefits delivered from the newest CPUs. It fully supports multi-threading and also every SSE instruction set to date, including SSE4.

For our test, we take a 1.2 GB source video file and export it to an HDV 1440x1080p resolution. Depending on the CPU used, the application will use either SSE3 or SSE4 for encoding.

This test is a perfect example of just how useful SSE4 is with a few select applications, and is a clear reason to give developers a push to include support in their own application if it makes sense. Once again, our SSE4-capable Q9450 showed the QX6850 who’s boss.

Photodex ProShow Gold

While TMPGEnc XPress’ purpose is to convert video formats, ProShow from Photodex helps turn your collection of photos into a fantastic looking slide show. I can’t call myself a slide show buff, but this tool is unquestionably definitive. It offers many editing abilities and the ability to export in a variety of formats, including a standard video file, DVD video and even HD video.

Like TMPGEnc and many other video encoders, ProShow can take full advantage of a multi-core processor. It doesn’t support SSE4 however, but hopefully will in the future as it would improve encoding times considerably. Still, when a slide show application handles a multi-core processor effectively, it has to make you wonder why there is such a delay in seeing a wider-range of such applications on the marketplace.

ProShow is quite reliable in that its results scale well with what we’d expect to see. It’s all about frequency here, thanks to the lack of SSE4 support.

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Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.

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