CustomPC Media Benchmarks

Download from: www.custompc.co.uk/benchmarks

Custom PC, bit-tech's sister magazine, has developed its own Media Benchmarks to simulate the tasks that most of us perform on a regular basis. There are three tests, each of which measure different aspects of a PC's performance.

You can download the suite from the link above, and submit your score to the benchmark leaderboard to see how your PC compares with those of others.

GIMP Image Editing

Image editing performance is appalling. It's not just lacking clock speed: even only 200MHz behind the Phenom II X3 720 BE it's still 15 per cent slower. Compared to the same price Phenom II X2 550 BE it's 26 per cent slower and the Intel dual core price equivalent is over a third slower. It needs to be overclocked to the max to even match the Intel chip, however it also matches the 720 Black Edition too, so maybe that just says something about AMD CPUs at this price in general for productivity: extra cores and more MHz don't always make a better product and it depends what you use it for.

Again the Athlon II X4 is about seven or eight per cent slower than the Phenom II X4 at the same clock though, which isn't a particuarly large difference.

Handbrake x.264 Video Encoding

One such task that the X4 620 is good at is video encoding, where it manages to outclass every other CPU on test. What's more, the Phenom II X4's L3 cache doesn't appear to help in this scenario, as the identically clocked CPUs perform the same.