Intel Core i7-2820QM – Sandy Bridge For Notebook PCs

Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 offers a hassle-free way to convert and sync videos, photos and music files to a broad choice of media players, without needing to understand complicated file formats and settings. Consumers simply import their media content then select a preferred playback device, and MediaEspresso 6 handles the rest. With the support of the latest CPU and GPU acceleration, MediaEspresso 6 offers ultra fast performance. MediaEspresso 6 is the fastest consumer video conversion software optimized with hardware acceleration.

We are benchmarking with a version of MediaEspresso 6 that supports Intel Quick Sync Video. The exact version that we have for testing is 6.5.1229_330995.

With this version installed we discovered that on the Sandy Bridge powered notebook that it does indeed support Intel Quick Sync Video and you can select between faster conversion or better quality. We didn’t know which setting to test, so we tried both settings.

We wanted to use a free video clip for our conversion test, so we headed over to H264info.com and downloaded the I Am Legend -1080p trailer with the Blu-ray profile. This clip was 1920x816px and just a hair over two minutes in length. This will be perfect to compare mobile platforms with! We tested all of the platforms with hardware encoding/decoding on and off if they supported both of these features.

Benchmark Results: We have come a very long way when it comes to video conversion in just three product generations. The Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53GHz processor is no slouch, but it doesn’t have any hardware acceleration available due to how the core architecture was designed. Due to this it took more time to convert the video clip than the length of the actual video! Last year’s Intel Core i5-540 processor does much better with hardware acceleration turned off, but with it on it’s nearly twice as fast. Not bad for a dual-core processor with Hyper-Threading, right? The AMD Phenom II X4 N930 is a true quad-core processor and it’s competitive with Intel’s Arrandale series of processors. The new Intel ‘Sandy Bridge’ mobile processors are very impressive as you can see from the performance chart above. With no help from hardware acceleration we turned in a super fast time of 45 seconds, but if you think that is impressive wait till you enable the hardware! We dropped our times down to just 10 seconds (14 if you want better video quality) and that is simply amazing.