Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965

MP3 Encoding:

DBPowerAMP, Moby - Play, WAV to 192kbps MP3.

MP3 encoding was pretty much dominated by the Athlon 64's but both the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 and the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz making a slight dent in the sea of green. The single core Athlon 64's performed the same as their dual core siblings, as expected. The FX-57 comes out on top, because there isn't a dual core Athlon 64 clocked at 2.8GHz, yet...

Image Manipulation:

Fireworks MX, 162 images; grayscale, 50% scale, export.

The tables are turned in our image manipulation benchmark - the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 is slightly faster than the Prescott-based Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz that runs at the same clock speed. The dual core Athlon 64 X2's are generally slightly slower than their single core cousins.