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AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Review
| Author | Edward Chester |
| Published | 23rd Apr 2009 |
| Manufacturer | AMD |
| Price | £189.56 (Exc VAT) |
| as reviewed | £217.99 (Inc VAT) |
| Latest Price |
| Performance | ![]() |
| Value | ![]() |
| Overall | ![]() |
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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Ed said on 23rd April 2009
basicasic said on 23rd April 2009
Talk about wanting it on a plate! Overclocking used to be a bit of a black art. Soldering resistors, joining tiny bridges with conductive paint, using the right memory and tinkerin... more
Ed said on 24th April 2009
As I explained, the system was essentially dead after some initial attempts and due to time constraints we weren't able to recover it for another run. Reading around, these wi... more
andy1001 said on 16th May 2009
I belive there is missclick - should be 6mb L3 cache instead of 2mb on page 1.
May i ask about cooling? Did you use components included in box or add your own cpu co... more
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You're right, we only did a 'verdict' on page 3. My bad. ;)