Intel’s Core i7-980X Extreme Edition – Ready for Sick Scores?

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.

With ProShow, the performance gain is even less than what we saw with TMPGEnc, with an average gain of 27%. That’s still much better than a quad-core, but we’re still not diving deep into the sixth core.

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.