Intel's Pentium 4 3.06GHz: Hyper-Threading on Desktops

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 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-HT 3.06GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz FSB) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz (400MHz FSB) 86.6 71.4 67.9 66.3 62.4 61.4 56.8 53.2 51.4 49.9 47.2 | 0 | 17 | 35 | 52 | 69 | 87 | 104

As we saw in our HT investigation, enabling the feature results in a fairly decent performance boost in video encoding applications thanks to their high latency instructions and long dependency chains. The end result is that the Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading enabled extends the lead even further at 3.06GHz; this would be the perfect CPU for a Media Center PC...

MP3 Audio Encoding Performance Lame 3.91 (Time in Seconds to Encode 170MB .wav File) Intel Pentium 4-HT 3.06GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz FSB) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz (400MHz FSB) 79 87 88 90 96 106 106 114 121 124 134 | 0 | 27 | 54 | 80 | 107 | 134 | 161

Hyper-Threading has no effect on single threaded applications so unless you're doing something alongside your MP3 encoding it's raw CPU power that's going to improve performance here. The 3.06GHz Pentium 4 extends Intel's lead to just over 10% faster than the Athlon XP 2800+.