Sony Vegas Studio Platinum 8

Website: Sony Creative Software

Sony Vegas Movie Studio is an industry leading movie making application that offers support for a large variety of video formats. It can handle the latest multi-channel audio and high-definition content, even including AVCHD and HDV. Further features include mixing and editing, video composite creating and video restoration among others. As a highly threaded application it makes great use of multi-core processors.

Here we use the free version: Platinum 8, to transcode a 720x480px 945MB raw .MTS with PCM audio into a 720x480px WMV9 at VBR90, with 5.1 channel 44.1KHz 64Kbps WMA audio.


It's three out of three for Intel's Core i7 920 and yet again it has a massive 79 percent relative positive performance compared to the baseline CPU here. The Q6600 overclocked isn't far behind though at 71 and 67 percent for DDR3 and DDR2 respectively, and the other overclocked CPUs we tested are upwards of 34 percent better value too.

All the Core i7 CPU's are in the plus, as are the AMD's again because despite the performance difference the price of each reflects they're all roughly around the same price : performance rating. From here, the Core 2 CPUs sit at the bottom of the table and the quads don't generally offer great value for your money.


When it comes to total platform cost though the overclocked Core i7 920 drops down the table a few degrees but still sits at nearly 100 percent better value than the baseline E8500 with DDR3. In contrast the Phenom X4's do fantastically here, and despite their general lower performance buying an AMD platform will get you a great bang for buck in Sony Vegas if you're on a budget - in fact, the Phenom X4 9950 is the best value non-overclocked CPU we've tested. However the king of the hill is still the overclocked Q6600 at 3.6GHz with a DDR2 motherboard though - at a whopping 113 percent relative positive it's a brilliant bargain, providing that is you can clock it this highly.

Generally the DDR2 boards offer better value than the DDR3 because the lower cost of memory and motherboard outweigh the performance gains for Core 2 CPUs, although the Core i7 CPUs are all upwards of 50 percent better value with the i7 920 hitting a high 79 percent.