AMD Athlon X2 7850 vs. Intel Pentium E5300: Choosing the Best $70 CPU

DivX 8.5.3 with Xmpeg 5.0.3

Our DivX test is the same DivX / XMpeg 5.03 test we've run for the past few years now, the 1080p source file is encoded using the unconstrained DivX profile, quality/performance is set balanced at 5 and enhanced multithreading is enabled:

The original Phenom was significantly weaker than Intel’s Core 2 at DivX encoding, thus the Athlon X2 vs. Pentium comparison here isn’t very favorable for AMD. The E5300 is 11% faster than the 7850 here. Even the E5200 is a better choice for DivX encoding.

x264 HD Video Encoding Performance

Graysky's x264 HD test uses the publicly available x264 codec (open source alternative to H.264) to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.

The x264 HD encode test is slightly different depending on what pass you look at. The first pass of the x264 HD encode actually has a number of unaligned loads, which penalizes Intel’s Core architecture - something fixed in Nehalem. The second and more CPU intensive pass is where Intel sees a 7.4% performance advantage over AMD. Despite the small advantage in the first pass of the encode, the win goes to Intel for a larger and more meaningful advantage in the second pass.

Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Advanced Profile

In order to be codec agnostic we've got a Windows Media Encoder benchmark looking at the same sort of thing we've been doing in the DivX and x264 tests, but using WME instead.

Our final pure encode test once again has the E5300 ahead of the Athlon X2 7850, but by only a 3.4% margin.