Maximum PC

How well does an Athlon II X2 250 encode video with Handbrake?

I know the answers can vary, but is the speed and quality of output decent (as in, it DOESN'T take 7 hours to encode a full video, like it would a single core proc)....

I know a quad would go much faster, but I'm considering selling my Q9550 with it's motherboard and going solo with my AMD dual core.

I would say that that quad you have is a better architecture, not to mention has twice the cores, so for handbrake and other multithreaded apps, I would expect the AMD to lose. Usually by a decent margin.

However, I have a core 2 duo E6550 in my desktop at home, and it has a lower clock speed than your proc. In most cases yours is faster and mine is not terribly slow. I've encoded movies before and it gets the job done in less time than I'm at school.

Here is a website with a quick rundown on the proc you have and its performance. It seems to be quite the overclocker.

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardw ... 250/4.html

thanks for the reply... i actually ended up selling the Athlon II x2 dual core and keeping my Intel quad core because I wanted to make sure I had enough processing power when I needed it (not that the Athlon II is a bad chip, but I could get my money back for it by selling it whereas with the quad, I couldn't get even close to what I paid for it a year ago).

Well, just so you don't have seller's remorse, here is a review comparing both stock clocked and overclocked versions of the one you sold and the one you have. As you can see, in most multithreaded apps, yours beats out the one you sold, and if you were to overclock the q9550, it'll give the athlon a run for its money even in single threaded apps.

I looked mainly at what I plan to do with the computer (encode/compress videos) which I was thinking that a quad would naturally do better at (especially since the Q9550 has 12MB of L2 cache and the Athlon only had 2MB).

Plus, I also looked into fact that I don't really play any games (and we know that AMDs are generally better for that), but do a lot of programming and video/picture work, which I felt the Q9550 was better for (at least, the programming part).

I also had to look at what I could get. I found that i'd probably get maybe $50 more if I sold the quad instead of the dual core, but to me, it wasn't worth selling the quad when I could easily get rid of the Athlon II (if priced right) for only a little less...

All in all, the guy who bought it got a pretty good deal: $200 for a complete Athlon II X2 250 CPU, Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H motherboard, 2GB of RAM, case, power supply, 160GB hard drive and a DVD Burner all for only $200... without an OS of course. I probably paid like $150 for the board and proc alone... the other parts were spares that i had lying around that i felt would make it easier to sell the entire thing as working system, rather than just parts.

That and I would have liked more PCI-E x1 slots on the AMD motherboard (it only had 1... where as my Intel's Gigabyte EP43-UD3L motherboard has 3... with which at some point in the future I'll turn the Intel into media/file server when I decide to do another rebuild in two or three years, so the extra PCI-E x1 slots will be helpful if I want to add RAID controllers.