Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550S 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 2.83GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 (12MB Cache) was just one second slower than the 3.00GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (8MB Cache) processor. This is very impressive since the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 retails for under $300 and the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 was over $999 when it was released in 2007. If you have an older dual-core LGA775 system this benchmark shows how much performance can be had by dropping in an Intel Q9950 processor.