picCOLOR, Movie Maker 2.1, MP3 encoding, CINEBENCH 2003
picCOLOR, an image analysis program, also shows better performance when 2 cores can be used in tandem. See how the 'D 820 is almost as fast as a 3.8GHz Pentium 4 570, and only narrowly behind the £500 '670. It's also faster than its direct AMD counterpart, the Athlon 64 3500+.
Microsoft's Movie Maker 2.1 ships with Windows XP SP2. It's a cinch to use and allows one to convert DV footage into smaller Windows Media Files through an easy-to-use GUI. The '670 is obviously a little quicker than the processor that it replaces as head of the 600-series, the 660, but the Pentium D 820 is quicker still. A rule of thumb is quickly and obviously established. If it's faster than a higher-clocked single-core model, the application has to be multi-threaded to some degree.
A multi-threaded (and HT-aware) version of LAME also shows just where the 'D 820 is good.
The multi-CPU render from CINEBENCH 2003 benefits CPUs with Hyper-Threading and, to a larger degree, those with 2 cores. Again, all single-core models in the test are left wanting.
