I just sold a lot of stuff on Ebay, and felt like spending a little of
it. So I upgraded the CPU on my media box. It was a Northgate P4 3.0
800Mhz FSB 512KB cache, and I upgraded to a Prescot P4 3.4 800Mhz 1MB
cache. I didn't expect much. I thought I might get a 10 percent boost. but
since I use this for encoding 10 percent could shave 24 minutes off a
filtered encoding of a one hour video file.
To bench mark it, I first booted up with the 3.0, and ran Sandra 2005 CPU
Benchmark. Then I rebooted and encoded a file I had previously edited. A TV
broadcast that I was encoding in highest quality DVD. I used TMPEnc 3.0 to
encode it, and I put it on a stopwatch.
When it finished, I shut down, and installed the 3.4 Ghz CPU ,and booted
up. Ran the same test with Sandra, rebooted, and encoded the same file, the
exact same way.
Sandra's results were pretty much what I would of expected
Dhrystone ALU showed a 7.2 percent improvement
Whetstone FPU showed a 8.6 improvement
Whetstone iSSE2 showed a 10.8 percent improvement
But the video encoding, which is a real world use test for me, was 18.69
percent faster. This is pretty darn good, and makes a real world
difference. It also makes the upgrade worth doing, for encoding
purposes. I will notice the difference with that much improvement.
