DivX, MP3 crunching, WinRAR
Media encoding was undertaken with XMPEG v5.02. It chose the SSE2 optimisations for the P4 and both Athlon 64 processors. The test was to encode the first VOB of American History X using a bitrate of 1000kb/s. Benchmark mode was limited to the first 5,000 frames and no sound was encoded. Black borders were cropped too. The graph displays the time taken by each setup.
MP3 encoding, sadly, doesn't care much for memory bandwidth, as the above graph highlights.
WinRAR 3.20 archiving is quite dependent on the amount and latency of bandwidth. The SN85G4 takes 2 seconds out of a comparable Athlon 64 3200+ setup, but it's still some way behind the pace-setting FX-51.
