Athlon II X4 640 vs. Core i3 530 CPU Review
VirtualDub + DivX
Contents
With VirtualDub we converted a full-length DVD movie to DivX format and saw how long it took for this conversion to be completed. The DivX codec is capable of recognizing and using not only more than one CPU (i.e., more than one core), but also the SSE4 instruction set (feature available only on the reviewed Intel processor).
The movie we chose to convert was Star Trek – The Motion Picture: Director’s Cut. We copied the movie to our hard disk drive with no compression, so the final original file on our HDD was 6.79 GB. After compressing it with DivX, the final file was only 767.40 MB, which is quite remarkable.
The results below are given in seconds, so the lower the better.
On the DivX conversion using the CPU or motherboard integrated graphics, the Athlon II X4 640 was 16% faster than the Core i3-530, showing us that having more “real” cores is more important than having the SSE4 instruction set in this particular application.
When we installed a Radeon HD 5670 on both systems, the performance difference dropped a little bit, but the Athlon II X4 640 was still 14% faster than the Core i3-530.