Alienware 7500 P2 with Blu-ray

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub MPEG-2 version 1.6.15 and a multi-threaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.

Again, we see that the Alienware system is slower here, quite probably due to memory speeds.

MP3 Encoding and Decoding:

We used LAME MT for our audio encoding test - it's the multi-threaded version of the popular LAME MP3 encoder. We ran tests with Intel's compilers - naturally, the Intel compiler resulted in some performance increases on Intel's processors. We converted all 18 tracks from Moby's popular Play album to a 192kbps variable bit-rate MP3.

The two systems are very close here, with really nothing to pull between them.