Under WinRAR 3.8 Intel's QX 9770 and QX 9650 take first and second position followed all five AMD X4 Phenom CPUs. For some reason the 3.0 GHz QX 9650 is even faster than its 3.2 GHz sib¬ling, the QX 9770. The Q8200 is too meek to play hardball with the big boys from AMD - and at 20 per cent less performance but a fifth of the price of the two costliest Intel CPUs, the Phenom X4 9950 makes the most sensible choice for those working with a lot of compression/decompres¬sion algorithms. DivX isn't multi¬core optimised at all.



we saw CPU utilisation at a steady 25 per cent under Windows' Task Manager's Performance pane. This means that only a single core is working and in case of a quad-<re CPU the other three cores are sitting idle. This version of DivX is also SSE 4 optimised, which means it is biased towards Intel's Wolf dale and Yorkfield CPUs; which is why the lack of multi-threading sup¬port came as a shock. We were surprised to see AMDs Phenom X4 9950 and X2 6000+ give Intel's Q8200 a good run for its money. The two Extreme Edition Intel CPUs are untouchable; but for their prices they had better be.