Intel Core i7 "Nehalem" 920, 940 & 965 XE Processor Review

iTunes MP3 Conversion

iTunes v7.6.1.9
Test: Convert raw 56 minute .WAV file to .MP3 (192kbps)
Comparison: Time to Finish

Apple iTunes, a necessary tool for millions of iPod users, and used by many who are not. The simple Mac styled GUI for all things audio has a wide range of features which allow users to do all sorts of things to their music. One of the most common tools is converting old and archaic CD Audio into the digitized format of MP3's. iTunes allows users to import songs from their CD while at the same time converting them to MP3 to be put onto an iPod or other MP3 Playing device. This process, while by no means the most difficult challenge in our CPU assault, is a common tool and very much affected by system efficiency.


Although iTunes is supposed to support two threads, it is very lackluster when it comes to properly utilizing more than one core. As a result, pure clock speed and L2 cache size are what matter in this benchmark, and the Penryn-based processors are able to put on a strong showing. From a clock-per-clock point-of-view, both microarchitectures are effectively equal in this seemingly single-threaded benchmark.

x264 HD Benchmark

x264 HD Benchmark v1.0
Test: MPEG-2 HD 720P Video Clip Conversion to x264
DVD Video Length: 30 Seconds
Comparison: FPS of Second Pass

x264 is quickly becoming the new codec of choice for encoding a growing number of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC videos. Think of it as the new Divx of HD and you can understand why we felt it critical to include. Tech Arp's recent development of the x264 HD Benchmark takes a 30 second HD video clip and encodes it into the x264 codec with the intention of little to no quality loss. The test is measured using the average frames per second achieved during encoding, which scales with processor speed and efficiency. The benchmark also allows the use of multi-core processors so it gives a very accurate depiction of what to expect when using encoding application on a typical full length video.


The x264 HD Benchmark is multi-threaded and very impressively so. It effectively places 100% load across all eight logical cores. As a result, the Core i7 processors further demonstrate their multi-threaded power and post a 40%+ clock-per-clock performance boost over the other processors. If you frequently encode high-quality x264 video files, the Core i7 is the processor that you have been waiting for. There is no doubt about it, with properly coded software this new microarchitecture is absolutely dominant when it comes to multimedia tasks.