Celeron, Pentium Dual Core and Athlon X2: Which One is the Best USD 70 CPU?

DivX Encoding

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 new SSE4 instruction set – but no CPU included in this review has this instruction set. , so we expect that CPUs with SSE4 support reach a higher performance here. From the CPUs we included in our review only Core 2 Duo E8400 supports SSE4.

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.

Athlon X2 4600+ was the fastest CPU for DivX encoding, being 4.91% faster than Core 2 Duo E4400, 7.89% faster than Pentium Dual Core E2180, 9.21% faster than Celeron E1400 and 15.77% faster than Pentium Dual Core E2160.

As you can see on the above chart, L2 memory cache makes a small difference for DivX encoding. Core 2 Duo E4400 (2 MB L2 cache) was 3.13% faster than Pentium Dual Core E2180 (1 MB L2 cache) and 4.52% faster than Celeron E1400 (512 KB L2 cache). The performance difference between Pentium Dual Core E2180 and Celeron E1400 was of only 1.44% thus we have to consider them as having the same performance level for DivX encoding.