Intel SkullTrail Preview – Dual Core 2 Extreme QX9775 Processors

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:The Skulltrail system was found to be 28% faster than the Intel QX9770 and 42% faster than the Intel QX6850. It just goes to show that having more cores helps as well as the move from 65nm to 45nm as seen between the QX9770 and QX6850.