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Ah, encoding MP3s. No matter how many advances there have been in audio formats and even with the proliferation of online music services, encoding our audio CDs into MP3s is still a stalwart of a computer's regular tasks. So, let's see how the Phenom II holds up.

Singe-track, single-thread encoding

It's the way it always used to be done. One track after another until the album's finished. For this test we encode 11 tracks using the LAME encoder.

Single-track, multi-threaded

A slight improvement over single-threaded encoding, this method will take advantage of multiple cores for each track it is currently encoding. This test encodes the same 11 tracks and uses the multi-threaded version of LAME.

Multi-track, multi-threaded

Finally, we have the quickest method; encoding as many mp3s at once as there are cores. We used DBPowerAmp's benchmark to load as many cores, or virtual cores in the case of i7, as possible.

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