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.
