Benchmarks:

We didn't bother with synthetic benchmarks, because they won't tell you anything interesting, we concentrate on real world applications, especially multimedia encoding.


Gordian Knot/XVID 1.1.2:

For our Gordian Knot testing we took a PAL epsiode of "Babylon 5" with a length of 41 minutes, 57 seconds and 8 frames.

We tried to "emulate" the most common usage of Gordian Knot:

1st: We have a perfect master, so we only de-interlace the content and resized it, without any other manipulations, we marked this as "fast".
2nd: You get bad mastering on many DVDs, especially "old" stuff or when the studios are in a hurry for the release. In this case you would want to improve the picture quality, which is done by filtering the content. You can choose from tons of filters for any purposes you can think of, we only used the most common "undot", "FluxSmooth" and "MSharpen". Of course we also de-interlaced. Filters were applied before any resizing took place (which is slower). We marked this as "slow".

If you need more info about filters, we recommend reading the doom9.org forum.

When using filters faster memory doesn't make a big difference, as the 0.5% speed increase is not worth mentioning. Without filters you'll get about 5-6% faster encoding. Of course faster memory has higher voltages and this comes with a penalty of 4-6W in power consumption per GB.

CL5 = CL5-5-5-15-CR2T, CL4 = CL4-4-4-12-CR1T