MSI K9N SLI Platinum

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.
Transcoding an MPEG-2 video stream into Xvid is the about the same speed as other boards tested, with again a couple of seconds overhead with SLI enabled.

MP3 Encoding:

We used LAME MT for our audio encoding test - it's the multithreaded version of the popular LAME MP3 encoder. We ran tests with both Intel's and Microsoft's compilers - naturally, the Intel compiler resulted in some performance increases on Intel's processors. We converted all 18 tracks from Moby's popular Play album to a 192kbps variable bit-rate MP3.

MP3 encoding is virtually the same across the board on both compiliers, give or take a second. The SLI overhead affords at most a second on top.

MP3 to WAV Decoding:

For our decoding test, we converted the MP3 tracks created in the previous test back to .WAV format, saving the output to a different folder.

Decoding MP3 to .WAV is as fast or fractionally faster than the other boards and again SLI adds a second to the decode time at most.