AMD's dual core Opteron & Athlon 64 X2 - Server/Desktop Performance Preview

Audio/Video Encoding

MusicMatch Jukebox 7.10

Not all audio encoding applications are multithreaded, and thus, we don't see overly impressive performance here from the X2 4400+. That being said, the X2 is at least competitive with its faster single core relatives.

DivX 5.2.1 with AutoGK

Armed with the DivX 5.2.1 and AutoGK 1.60, we took all of the processors to task at encoding a chapter out of "Pirates of the Caribbean". We set AutoGK to give us 75% quality of the original DVD rip and did not encode audio.

The days of AMD losing the encoding comparisons are over - the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ offers encoding performance that rivals the Pentium D 840. Unfortunately at the sub-$500 level, AMD remains fairly non-competitive in encoding performance.

XviD with AutoGK

Another very popular codec is the XviD codec, and thus, we measured encoding performance using it instead of DivX for this next test. The rest of the variables remained the same as the DivX test.

Windows Media Encoder 9

The Athlon 64 X2 continues to dominate in encoding performance in our own Windows Media Encoder 9 test.