Review-Phenom II X4 980 Processor: AMD’s Fastest Quad Core CPU is Here!

MediaEspresso 6.5

MediaShow Espresso 6.0 is the latest version of this popular video encoding software from Cyberlink. The program converts video from one format to the other (available formats include BlackBerry and iPhone-specific video, and others). Media Espresso 6.0 supports AMD (ATI) Stream and NVIDIA CUDA accelerations. The newest version also offers Intel Quick Sync acceleration. Results are measured in the amount of time needed to finish the video conversion process. Less time means better performance.

The last two scenarios show no performance difference at all between the three processors in our test. However, in the first two where we did notice some gap, it seems that higher clockspeed helps when encoding low-resolution videos. When it comes to high-res video encoding, the amount of available cores matters more.

Photoshop CS 5

Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the latest version of the world’s most famous image editing software. We carried out our test using an action that applies “Photo Merge” and several filters on three TIFF images. Results are measured in the amount of time needed to finish the process. Lower figures are better.

The higher clockspeed on the Phenom II X4 980 helps it get ahead of the others in this Photoshop benchmark, albeit only by a very small margin.

WinZip15

WinZip is a well-known file compression software. The Zip files produced by this program can be password protected using the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption method. Some new processors are equipped with AES instruction to accelerate this encryption process. Results are measured in the amount of time needed to finish the test. Lower scores are better.

The benefit from Phenom II X4 980 BE’s higher clockspeed is more apparent in AES Encription scenario.