Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 – The 45nm Era Begins

Nero Recode

Where video conversion is concerned, one of the applications I’ve grown to enjoy over the years is Nero Recode. Though it’s export options are extremely limited, they offer high image quality and decent file weight. Nero 8 was released earlier this month, but lacks support for SSE4. In a recent meeting, we questioned whether or not we would see SSE4 support in a future update, but we were told that there is no immediate plans to implement it, although the “guys in the lab” are taking a look at it. Nero exhibits confidence that their application is optimized enough as is, and SSE4 is not needed.

For this test, we’ve first ripped our copy of our concert DVD, Killadelphia, by Lamb of God. The original DVD rip weighs in at 7.7GB, but we are using Nero to reconvert it to 4.5GB so that it will fit on a normal-sized DVD to use as a backup.

Absolutely no performance gains were seen in our standard DVD re-encoding, but taking the main movie and converting it to a mobile file proved 8% faster on our QX6950. The extra L2-Cache might have played a role in that instance.

Adobe After Effects CS3

For our last video-specific benchmark, we will be using one of the leading video creation tools available, Adobe After Effects CS3. The test does not benefit from SSE4, however it will take advantage of a multi-core processor in general. Our test will include a workload that applies numerous filters to a variety of file types, ultimately exporting it as an AVI movie.

After Effects saw 6% gains with our new processor. Though not entirely impressive, clock for clock, we are pleased with anything over a 2% increase.