Transcoding is where you convert date from one format to another. It's actually a very popular activity that you guys likely do one a regular basis. Transcoding movies or music. In this test we are converting a 1080P high definition VC-1 formatted file towards the Windows WMV9 format.

Once we start transcoding video content we again see that results are pretty close to each other but as you can observe the transcoding process very much likes faster timed memory. On top the memory at baseline configuration, 1600 MHz.

F.E.A.R.  (games)

F.E.A.R. makes its cinematic pretensions clear from the start. As soon as the credits roll, and the music starts, you are treated to the full works. The camera pans across scores of troops locked 'n' loaded and ready to hunt you down, all seemingly linked to 'Paxton Fettel', a strange kind of guy with extraordinary psychic power capable of controlling battalions of soldiers and a habit of feeding off any poor unfortunate innocents - presumably to aid his powers of concentration. It doesn’t end there, after a short briefing at F.E.A.R. HQ you are sent off to hunt down Fettel equipped with reflexes that are 'off the chart'. These reflexes are put to excellent use, with a slow motion effects like that of Max Payne, or the before mentioned Matrix. But here, it is oooohhhh so much more satisfying thanks to the outstanding environmental effects. Sparks fly everywhere, as chunks of masonry are blasted from the walls and blood splatters from your latest victim. The physics are just great, with boxes sent flying, shelves tipped over, and objects hurtling towards your head. And the explosions, well, the explosions just have to be seen, and what's so great about this is you can witness it in all its glory in slow motion.

As always with memory and CPU tests, we include a game. We use a low resolution (always) as a high resolution would be GPU bound, meaning the graphics card would limit the results. It's pretty amazing to see that the results throughout the scope are extremely small and close to NIL.

Now I've been thinking why game results show so little performance increase. And I've concluded, for games to sow a significant difference, they need to be CPU limited. See, if you can free up that CPU processing power with faster memory bandwidth, it'll show an incremental difference.

The fact is, the CPU (Core i7 965) is so fast, that the GPU is pretty much maxed out. And thus even at 1024x768 a GPU bottleneck kicks in due to the extremely fast processor.

For future reviews we'll likely take a more CPU bound gaming title. But if you look at it from another side, this is the reality of the platform. For gaming with modern games the memory bandwidth extremes do not matter very much.