Intel's Core i7 870 & i5 750, Lynnfield: Harder, Better, Faster Stronger

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:

And we're done. DivX, historically a stronghold for AMD's Phenom II processors (at least compared to their price-competitive Penryn counterparts) is faster on the Core i5 750 than on the Phenom II X4 965 BE. What's wrong with that?

The i5 750 costs $199, the 965 BE costs $245. Intel is selling you more transistors for less than AMD is for once.

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.

In the first pass AMD is quite competitive, outpacing the i5 750, but when we get to the actual encode:

It's close, but the cheaper i5 750 is faster than the Phenom II X4 965 BE once again; Hyper Threading keeps the i7 920 ahead.

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.

AMD is about 6% faster than the i5 750 here, it looks like the Phenom II does have some hope left for it. Let's see how the rest unfolds...