Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Processor Review – 45nm Wolfdale

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 to directly output to over 20 devices, 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 obviously scales very well with processor clock frequency as you can see above. The Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 blows away Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 as a result, but also keep in mind there is about a ~6% architecture benefit when going from the 65nm Conroe processor to 45nm Wolfdale. The numbers here show a ~1.24x gain from E6750 (CNR 2.66) to E8500 (WFD 3.16), which comes partly from the frequency gain (~19%) and partly from the architecture gain. The AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition didn’t do too well and the 2.3GHz quad-core processor was actually slower than the Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Processor.