Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, Phenom X3 and Phenom X4: Which One is the Best USD 200 CPU?

VirtualDub-MPEG2 + DivX 6.8.3

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, so we expect that CPUs with SSE4 support reach a higher performance here. From the CPU’s 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.

On VirtualDub Core 2 Duo E8400 was clearly the fastest CPU due to its SSE4 instruction set, which is recognized by DivX encoder (you have to manually enable it to use SSE4, though). This CPU was 31.03% faster than Core 2 Quad Q6600, 36.50% faster than Phenom X4 9550 and 38.16% faster than Phenom X3 8750.

Comparing the CPUs that don’t have SSE4 support, Core 2 Quad Q6600 was the fastest CPU, being 7.93% faster than Phenom X4 9550 and 10.33% faster than Phenom X3 8750.