Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8

Website: Sony Creative Software

Sony Vegas Movie Studio is an industry leading movie making application that offers support for a large variety of video formats. It can handle the latest multi-channel audio and high-definition content, even including AVCHD and HDV.

Further features include mixing and editing, video composite creating and video restoration among others.

Here we use the free version: Platinum 8, to transcode a 1080p High-Definition 5.1 Channel AC3 audio DivX file into a 720p WMV9HD in CBR Compression at 25 fps with the audio converted into 192Kbps, 48KHz, 16-bit Stereo WMA9. Overall, the bitrate equates to around 5Mbps.




Again, the quad-core CPUs come out trumps, but the Wolfdales are again the top of the dual-core pack, or at least ahead of the equivalently clocked Conroe parts by roughly 20 seconds over this several minute test.

Blender

Website: Blender.org

Blender is a free, open source software 32-bit 3D modelling, animation, rendering, post-production, and gaming program. Initially developed by Ton Roosendaal's company NaN in the Netherlands, its popularity, and capabilities, have grown over the years. There is a large and active user base with ongoing development by dedicated hackers, making Blender a powerful and viable 3D software solution.

It can be used for modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulating, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications.

Blender has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, and soft body dynamics, modifier based modelling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting.



Even though Blender is multi-threaded (in the SMP test) it still relies on clock speed, memory bandwidth and cache over cores - the Wolfdales come out trumps in all accounts. For example, the E8200 is a couple of seconds faster than the E6750 and the quad-core Q6700, all of which are clocked 2.66GHz.