Intel's Core 2 Duo processors

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0:

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3MP photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor. We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.

The Core 2 Extreme X6800 and Core 2 Duo E6700 were both faster than AMD's flagship Athlon 64 FX-62 by 13% and 3% respectively.

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.

Our VirtualDub test was dominated by Intel's Core 2 Duo processors. The flagship X6800 was nearly 40% faster than the Athlon 64 FX-62, while the mainstream E6400 managed to oust AMD's flagship chip by nearly 30 seconds - cripes!