AMD Phenom X4 9950 and 9350e Quad-Core Processor Review

Photodex ProShow Gold 3.2

ProShow Gold allows the user to combine photos, videos and music to create spectacular slide shows. The software provides the capability to share memories with friends and family on DVD, PC and the Web. ProShow Gold brings still photos to life by adding motion effects like pan, zoom, and rotate. The user can also add captions to a photo or video and choose from over 280 transition effects.

The workload we are using takes 29 high resolution jpeg photos and converts them to an mpeg2, widescreen DVD quality, 3min 9sec slideshow video file. The input photos are in 3872×2592 resolution and total about 170MB in size.

ProShow Gold 3.2 lets you share your slide shows in virtually any format and on any device. You can upload your shows directly to YouTube or choose from over 20 devices to directly output to including the iPod, Blackberry, ZuneTM and more. Not bad for software that runs under $70 and is optimized for eight-cores! Our benchmark testing wasn’t at 100% load the entire time, but averaged around 95% during the testing period.

Benchmark Results: Photodex Proshow software showed that the speed bump AMD Phenom X4 9950 was greatly needed and was able to pass up the Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 processor as a result. The Intel Q6600 operates at 2.4GHz with 8MB of shared L3 Cache was just ahead of the 2.6GHz Phenom X4 9950 with 4MB of combined L2 and L3 cache in this benchmark. The AMD Phenom 9350e was also impressive and it was able to perform faster than the AMD Phenom 9600 since the 9600 had the TLB bug and the BIOS fix slows the system performance down.