AMD Phenom II X4 955 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.

Well, AMD’s domination couldn’t last forever, right? In the case of ProShow, it seems to heavily favor Intel processors, so the result isn’t much of a surprise. Such stark differences just aren’t natural given what we’ve seen up to this point. This is one application likely to hit the cutting block in our upcoming methodology revision.

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.

The 955 may have fallen slightly behind in the previous test, but it catches right back up here, which again, is rather impressive given Intel’s typical multi-media dominence. The extra cache over the budget-oriented CPUs is certainly paying off.