dBpoweramp R13.2

dBpoweramp is one of really rare audio converters that uses all processor cores to complete the tasks faster. TO find out processor performance high quality .flac audio tracks are used to convert into high quality .mp3 format via LAME encoder.

As you can see from the results, Intel processors dominate audio encoding tasks and strangely older Core 2 Quads finish just ahead of two Core i5s. Hyper Threading and Turbo Boost on 661 manage to nullify the advantage of four physical cores and twice the cache that Core i5 750 has.

BonkEncoder v1.0.14

BonkEncoder is a small end free audio encoder with a wide range of supported audio formats. For this test we encode high quality .flac files into 192kbs ABR MP3 format via LAME codec.

With its new version, BonkEncoder too finally uses all available CPU cores but it would seem that Hyper Threading here doesn't work so well as with dBpoweramp, so Core i5 661 finishes with some margin behind Core i5 750, but still manages to beat Intel's Q9400.

ImToo Audio Encoder v2.1.78

ImToo Audio Encoder is representing commercial versions of audio encoders. It’s easy to use, with broad audio format support, and for this test it is used to encode a high quality .wmv files to convert into 128 kbs quality .mp3 format, also using Lame encoder.

You can easily see that ImToo uses just a single thread so it's no surprise to see Core i5 661 leading the way thanks to its high clocked Turbo Boost.