AMD's AM2: Athlon 64 FX-62 & X2 5000+

Xvid Encoding:

AutoGK 2.20; 15 minutes of Dr Who, convert to 175MB MPEG, 2 passes, 720x416;

The Athlon 64 FX-62 is the fastest-available chip when it comes to video encoding - only the overclocked Core Duo T2600 is able to outperform it by a single second. There appears to be some performance improvements from moving to AM2 if we compare the encoding results from the two FX-60 chips. The AM2 platform appears to be over 40 seconds faster than older Socket 939 chips - that's a nice improvement for the same clock rate. The smaller L2 cache on the X2 5000+ costs nearly 30 seconds encoding time, but it still outperforms the Socket 939 FX-60 chip.

DVD Ripping:

DVD Shrink 3.2; default settings; auto shrink (59.2%) of the [i]Rush Hour DVD;[/i]

It is clear that the DVD drive is a limitation in this test, but its not often that you rip a DVD direct from your hard disk drive. The FX-60 clocked AM2 chip is around two seconds slower than its Socket 939 equivalent, while Athlon 64 FX-62 is the fastest of AMD's chips. In this particular scenario, the smaller L2 cache on the X2 5000+ costs it four seconds over the 2600MHz, 2x1MB L2 cache chip that we've referred to as Athlon 64 FX-60.