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:

Finally, after struggling far too long in our DivX encoding test AMD is now able to claim a spot in the top three. While it's still slower than the Core i7 920, the Phenom II X4 955 is faster than any Core 2 Quad on the list when it comes to 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.

More important than DivX encoding performance is x264 encoding performance these days, and the Phenom II X4 955 does quite admirably here as well. The second pass is the more interesting one as that's the more strenuous pass:

The 955 is a hair faster than the Q9550 but unable to touch the Core i7 920.

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.

Once again, short of the i7, the Phenom II X4 955 is the fastest quad-core here.

3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test

Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:

Even 3D rendering performance under 3dsmax 9 is quite competitive. Both the 955 and 940 are able to hang with the Q9400 and Q9550. Once again, the i7s hold a generational gap advantage in performance.

Cinebench R10

Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.

Single or multi-threaded, the 955 is faster than the Q9550 here. But if you're serious about 3D rendering you'll want the Core i7.

POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance

POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.

I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.

PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

AMD's Phenom II has traditionally done quite well in our PAR2 recovery test, the 955 continues the tradition. It's the i7's Hyper Threading that gives it the significant edge here, but the Q9550 can't stand a chance.

Blender 2.48a

Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.

This is one of those unfortunate cases where switching platforms actually robbed us of performance, the 955 should outperform the 940 here but it put out numbers a bit slower than our older AM2+ platform which unfortunately doesn't have support for the new CPU just yet. Either way, the Q9550 is too far ahead to be toyed with.

Microsoft Excel 2007

Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.

Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation

Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spent encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.

Making a Blu-ray disc is still mostly an encoding task, which once again falls right into the Phenom II's strengths. If you can't afford an i7 system, a Phenom II 955 or even a 940 will do quite well here.

Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation

Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.

We see more of the same here - the Phenom II X4 955 outperforms even the Q9650.

WinRAR - Archive Creation

Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of xe/files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:

Fallout 3 Game Performance

Bethesda’s latest game uses an updated version of the Gamebryo engine (Oblivion). This benchmark takes place immediately outside Vault 101. The character walks away from the vault through the Springvale ruins. The benchmark is measured manually using FRAPS.

Gaming performance is a particularly strong suit of the Phenom II processor, here it is actually faster than the i7-920 although not by a noticeable margin.

Left 4 Dead

FarCry 2 Multithreaded Game Performance

FarCry 2 ships with the most impressive benchmark tool we’ve ever seen in a PC game. Part of this is due to the fact that Ubisoft actually tapped a number of hardware sites (AnandTech included) from around the world to aid in the planning for the benchmark.

For our purposes we ran the CPU benchmark included in the latest patch:

The Far Cry 2 engine appears to put a greater focus on threading, which may prove to be the case with future titles as well - the end result is the i7s do quite well and the Phenom II actually falls behind the Q9400.

Crysis Warhead

The 955 just edges out the Q9550 under Crysis Warhead. The i7 continues to lead in performance.

Power Consumption

The Phenom II X4 955 draws slightly more power than the Core 2 Quad Q9550, but not by a significant amount. Based on its performance, the 955 takes the energy efficiency crown away from the Q9550 in the majority of our tests.

출처- http://www.anandtech.com

AMD 신형 페넘II 955는 인텔 요크필드 9550보다 가격은 저렴하면서 전반적으로 높은 성능을 나타낸다. 전력소모는 페넘 최상위 계열답게 페넘라인업에서는 가장 많이 먹고 네할렘보다는 적게 먹는다. AM3 인터페이스 같은 경우 내년까지도 유지가 되기 때문에 새로 구입을 하는 유저는 AM3 플랫폼으로 조합하는것이 실효성이 높고, 가격에 부담이 없다면 AMD의 절대적인 벽인 네할렘 시스템으로 구성하는것이 합리적,