Corsair Dominator 9136C5D & 10000C5DF

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.

We see there is some drop in the encoding time, but it's largely variable depending on the motherboard again. On average there is only a few seconds drop, and whilst memory bandwidth is very important to video encoding, CPU MHz is also important. The slight drop from 2.93GHz to 2.86GHz completely negates any performance increase gained from faster memory on the Asus board.

MP3 Encoding:

We used LAME MT for our audio encoding test -- it's the multithreaded version of the popular LAME MP3 encoder. We ran tests with both Intel's and Microsoft's compilers - naturally, the Intel compiler resulted in some performance increases on Intel's processors. We converted all 18 tracks from Moby's popular Play album to a 192kbps variable bit-rate MP3.

There is virtually no performance increase in using faster memory, and again we see that a slight drop in CPU MHz completely overrules any memory bandwidth increase for the Asus. MP3 decoding, which is also largely dependent on hard drive speed, sees a drop in performance on both Asus and Inno3D motherboards.