AMD's Athlon XP 3000+: Barton cuts it close

Video Encoding Performance - DiVX/XMpeg 4.5

What was once reserved for "professional" use only has now become a task for many home PCs - media encoding. Today's media encoding requirements are more demanding than ever and are still some of the most intensive procedures you can run on your PC.

We'll start off with a "quick" conversion of a DVD rip (more specifically, Chapter 40 from the Star Wars Episode I DVD) to a DiVX MPEG-4 file. We used the latest DiVX codec (5.03) in conjunction with Xmpeg 4.5 to perform the encoding at 720 x 480.

We set the encoding speed to Fastest, disabled audio processing and left all of the remaining settings on their defaults. We recorded the last frame rate given during the encoding process as the progress bar hit 100%

MPEG-4 Video Encoding Performance MPEG-2 to DiVX Conversion using XMpeg 4.5 & DiVX 5.0.2 (Frames per Second - Higher is Better) Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz HT Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz) Barton AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz AMD Athlon XP 2700+ (2.167GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.50GHz AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.083GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz AMD Athlon XP 1500+ (1.33GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.6AGHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.5GHz 97.9 82.8 80.5 77.6 74.2 71.1 70.5 70.5 69.2 68.2 67.9 66 62.4 61.7 58.8 58.4 57.4 57.4 57.2 55.9 55.6 54.8 52.9 52.6 50.9 50.3 49.5 49 48.8 48.8 45.9 | 0 | 20 | 39 | 59 | 78 | 98 | 12

The Pentium 4 dominates in this test and the boost from Hyper-Threading is nothing short of impressive, the added L2 cache of Barton isn't helping much here.

This chart helps you see exactly how much of a boost Hyper-Threading gives Intel, that last spike is all because of Hyper-Threading.