AMD Athlon 64 FX-60

MP3 Encoding:

DBPowerAMP, Moby - Play, WAV to 192kbps MP3.

MP3 encoding was pretty much dominated by the Athlon 64's with only the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz making a dent in the sea of green. The single core Athlon 64's produced the same time as their equally clocked dual core siblings, meaning that this test is only using a single thread.

Image Manipulation:

Fireworks MX, 162 images; grayscale, 50% scale, export.

There is a similar story in our image manipulation benchmark. If anything, the dual core Athlon 64 X2 processors are slightly slower than the single core Athlon 64's at the same clock speed, but we're talking about less than one second on average during our 162-image batch script.