Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 blazingly fast media universal converter that can transcode your videos, photos and music files and out put them to a huge range of portable devices including mobile phones, portable media players and even game consoles. With technologies like Smart Detect, Direct Sync and CyberLink’s TrueTheater video enhancements, you can not only forget about complicated format, resolution and output settings, but your converted file will come out the other side looking better than when it went in! MediaEspresso 6.5 can be used to output your slideshows and videos to mobile devices like an iPhone, iPod, PSP or Zune. Pre-set profiles eliminate the need for any complex settings and you can just drag-and-drop the video files you want to convert straight into the application.

We downloaded a clip that was encoded at 24 frames per second (fps) at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 (1080p). We then used MediaEspresso 6.5 to convert this clip to work on our iPhone. If you have this software and want to try it out yourself you can download the Coral Reef Adventure (IMAX) 1080p clip that we used from this site.

Benchmark Results: The Intel Pentium Processor G620 does not feature Intel Quick Sync Video and as a result wasn’t able to run this benchmark with acceleration enabled. The Intel Pentium G620 dual-core processors was slower than the other Intel processors, but was faster than AMD’s Llano A-Series APUs and that is impressive. For example the AMD A6-3650 has four real cores running at 2.6GHz and finished 16 seconds slower than the two Intel cores running at 2.6GHz. It just goes to show how much more powerful the Intel X86 architecture is when you take the two brands and compare them at the same CPU clock frequency and with identical memory speeds.

When running this benchmark we found that the Cyberlink software detected the Intel Pentium G620 as having Intel Quick Sync Video, so we enabled hardware encoding and gave it a shot. When we enabled it and tried to convert the video the entire system would lock up and the Intel graphics driver would crash. We have contacted both Intel and Cyberlink to let them know about this bug and hope the properly note that the Intel Pentium ‘Sandy Bridge’ Processor series does not support Quick Sync Video.

On August 3rd, 2011 Intel released a new video driver that goes by version 8.15.10.2462. This new driver build fixes the Intel Quick Sync video issue that we ran into during this review. If you notice in the screenshot above Intel Quick Sync Video is no longer detected and you don’t have the ability to enable hardware encoding now. If you are running an Intel Pentium G620, G840 or G850 processor be sure to update your video drivers to version 8.15.10.2462 to avoid application failures like we experienced. You can download them from here.