AMD Phenom II X4 810 & X3 720 Black Edition

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.

Though no SSE4 optimization is taking place here, Intel’s processors managed to beat out AMD’s offerings in both runs. The X4 810, for example, is faster overall where raw frequency is concerned, but it still fell considerably behind the Q8200. Likewise, the X3 720 performed quite similarly to Intel’s Dual-Core E8300, which carries roughly the same clock speed.

Sandra 2009 Multi-Media

This test here stresses the CPU’s ability to handle multi-media instructions and data, using both MMX and SSE2/3/4 as the instruction sets of choice. The results are divided by integer, floating point and double precision, three specific numbering formats used commonly in multi-media work.

This graph puts us back in the same position we were in with our two synthetic 3D rendering benchmarks. Once again, AMD’s X4 810 slightly outperforms the Q8200, while the X3 720 falls just behind it.