by Rob Williams on May 28, 2010 in Processors
Most of today’s desktop CPUs, including budget models, tend to be good for overclocking. But for those who are looking for the ultimate in tweaking ability, Intel’s mainstream models have left a bit to be desired. With the K series, though, it aims to remedy that situation by offering unlocked models at affordable prices.
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.
Once again, the Core i7-875K performs on par with the Core i7-870, and the Core i5-655K continues to perform well.
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.
Leave it to a synthetic benchmark to show us just what we wanted to see… a 50% increase. We call these synthetic benchmarks for a reason, because in the real-world, as we’ve seen, it’s very hard to exploit all six cores at once, or even come close to an actual 50% increase.