Custom PC Media Benchmarks 2007

Gimp and Handbrake tests

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

Image editing with Gimp

Website: www.gimp.org

Far from being some kind of pr0n-filtering tool, Gimp is an open source image editing application - Gimp is an acronym of GNU Image Manipulation Program. Our test simulates how well a PC can manipulate a collection of large digital photos, and to achieve a low time requires a PC with a powerful CPU, plenty of quick memory and efficient hard disk drive access.


The latest C3 965 Black Edition is, on average, slightly faster when overclocked and even a nose ahead at stock speeds. Its Intel competition, notably from the i5-750 is again significantly faster, with a 25 second advantage at stock speeds and coming up to a minute when overclocked.


We tested the effect of Cool'n'Quiet with the older C2 core and compared it against the C3. While the C3 is literally only two seconds faster when power saving is off (and always running at full speed), it actually turns out two seconds slower than the C2 with it turned on. The effect is minuscule, we admit, however this "hardware implementation" doesn't seem to have affected much.

Video encoding with Handbrake

Website: http://handbrake.fr

We use the open-source, GPL-licensed, multi-platform, multi-threaded video encoder Handbrake to encode a HD video using the H.264 codec. This primarily tests multi-threaded CPU and memory subsystem performance.


The slight increase in overclocked speed yields a seven second faster result on the C3 compared to C2 965 Black Edition, however at stock speeds its performance consistently dropped off by seven seconds also. Again, the Intel alternatives still outperform even the fastest AMD by some considerable margin - especially when overclocked.


The effect of Cool'n'Quiet is more pronounced here, dropping the encoding time by nine seconds with the C3, compared to just seven seconds with the C2, even if the C3 still comes out fractionally faster in both cases.