AMD Athlon 64 FX-60

Multi-Tasking 3

Encoding a DVD, compressing a large folder during high-res video playback:
DVD Shrink 3.2, WinRAR 3.51 & Windows Media Player 10; record DVD encoding time while compressing UT2004 root directory and during playback of Episode 1 of 24 season 4 encoded in High-Resolution DivX format (700MB for 45 minutes of footage).

We experienced extreme lag during video playback on the single core Athlon 64's, and generally the CPU did not want to handle more than one process at a time. If you leave the process priority at its default, the DVD shrink will take more than 10 hours to complete - we'd go so far as to say this is not possible on the single core Athlon 64s.

The Athlon 64 FX-60, the other Athlon 64's and all of the Intel processors did not suffer from these problems and were able to handle all three tasks at once. The Pentium Extreme Edition 955 was in a completely different league to all other processors, with virtually no slowdown in encode time when compared to just running DVD Shrink on its own! Amazing.

Multi-Tasking 4

Encoding an CD album from .WAV to .MP3 during high-res video playback:
DBPowerAMP & Windows Media Player 10; record 192kbps MP3 encoding time during playback of Episode 1 of 24 season 4 encoded in High-Resolution DivX format (700MB for 45 minutes of footage).

There were some minor playback problems with the single core Athlon 64 processors, whereby some frames were dropped due to the MP3 encoding taking priority - this got worse as the clock speed was reduced. However, the encode time was still good on the single core processors - a less CPU intensive video stream would have little or no frame drops.