Custom PC Media Benchmarks 2007

Gimp and Handbrake tests

Download from: www.custompc.co.uk/benchmarks

Custom PC, bit-tech's sister magazine, has developed its own Media Benchmarks to simulate the tasks that most of us perform on a regular basis. There are three tests, each of which measure different aspects of a PC's performance.

You can download the suite from the link above, and submit your score to the benchmark leaderboard to see how your PC compares with those of others.

The scores are normalised against a reference PC that includes a stock-speed Core 2 Duo E6700, 2GB of DDR2 memory and a fast P45 motherboard, as you can see below. This PC scores 1,000 points, so if your PC scores 1,300, it's 30 per cent faster than the reference system, and if it scores less than 1,000 points, it's slower.

Image editing with Gimp

Website: www.gimp.org
Far from being some kind of pr0n-filtering tool, Gimp is an open source image editing application - Gimp is an acronym of GNU Image Manipulation Program. Our test simulates how well a PC can manipulate a collection of large digital photos, and to achieve a low time requires a PC with a powerful CPU, plenty of quick memory and efficient hard disk drive access.


With memory performance as well as CPU processing power tested here, it's no surprise to see the Core i7s outstrip the Phenom II by some margin. The 955 BE again keeps the Core i7 920 honest at stock speeds, but can't keep up when both are overclocked. However, notice how well the £195 955 BE does against the £750 965 EE - it's only 13 per cent slower but costs almost four times less.

The lead of the 975 EE over the 965 EE is slender, either at stock speeds or when both are overclocked.

Video encoding with Handbrake

Website: http://handbrake.fr
We use the open-source, GPL-licensed, multi-platform, multi-threaded video encoder Handbrake to encode a HD video using the H.264 codec. This primarily tests multi-threaded CPU and memory subsystem performance.


The Hyper-Threading of the Core i7 CPUs give them a big lead over the AMD 955 BE when encoding video - you have to overclock your 955 BE to 3.8GHz to get the performance of a Core i7 at 2.66GHz, for example. Again, we see the 975 EE maintain a slight lead over the 965 EE at stock and overclocked speeds.