Intel's Pentium 4 2.80GHz - Moving to the Head of the Class

Media Encoding Performance

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 (5.02) in conjunction with Xmpeg 4.5 to perform the encoding.

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 Encoding Performance - Xmpeg 4.5/DiVX 5.02 Conversion Frame Rate (higher is better)

Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.60GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.4BGHz Intel Pentium 4 2.50GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz (400MHz) AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz (400MHz) AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz) AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) 75.3 72.8 71.5 69.5 68.2 66.9 65.0 64.3 61.4 60.4 58.7 56.8 56.6 54.2 53.2 52.2 49.9 48.9 | 0 | 15 | 30 | 45 | 60 | 75 | 90

Even at lower clock speeds, the Pentium 4 benefits greatly from its 533MHz FSB in the MPEG-4 conversion test; a very bandwidth intensive test, it's no wonder the Pentium 4 does quite well here.

MP3 audio encoding is another great CPU test, although this sort of an application is much less platform intensive than the MPEG-4 test from above. Raw computational power is mostly stressed in the following MP3 encoding test; we encoded a 170MB wav file into a VBR (Variable Bit Rate) MP3 using the highest quality settings (-V 0) allowed by the LAME 3.91 MP3 encoder.

MP3 Encoding Performance - LAME 3.91 Time in Seconds to Encode 170MB .wav File

Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.60GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.50GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.4BGHz Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz (400MHz) AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) 86 90 91 93 95 96 97 101 101 106 106 110 110 114 119 121 124 130 | 0 | 26 | 52 | 78 | 104 | 130 | 156

The situation is a bit different when you look at MP3 encoding; this is definitely not as bandwidth-strenuous of a task as MPEG-4 encoding and thus we see a heated battle between the Athlon XP 2600+ and the Pentium 4 2.80GHz; there's also little benefit of going with a 533MHz FSB part in this case.