With VirtualDub we converted a full-length DVD movie to DivX format and saw how long it took for this conversion to be completed. The DivX codec is capable of recognizing and using not only more than one CPU (i.e., more than one core), but also the SSE4 instruction set.

The movie we chose to convert was Star Trek – The Motion Picture: Director’s Cut. We copied the movie to our hard disk drive with no compression, so the final original file on our HDD was 6.79 GB. After compressing it with DivX, the final file was only 767.40 MB, which is quite remarkable.

The results below are given in seconds, so the lower the better.

On DivX encoding Core i5-750, Core i7-870 and Core i7-920 achieved the same performance level. Core i7-965 was 12.74% faster than them and they were, on average, 7.65% faster than Core 2 Extreme QX 9770, 23.98% faster than Core 2 Duo E8400 and 37.98% faster than Core 2 Quad Q6600.