AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition Quad-Core Processor Review

x264 HD Video Encoding

Simply put, it is a reproducible measure of how fast your machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. It’s nice because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The video encoder (x264.exe) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other.

Benchmark Results: The AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition processor has similar performance to the Intel Core i7 950, at least for the first pass. The first pass the AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition averaged 120.29 frames per second, while the Intel Core i7 950 was 2.73 frames per second faster. In the second pass, which is much more processor intensive, the gap between these two processors increased. The Phenom II 980 Black Edition averaged 24.37 frames per second while the Intel Core i7 950 averaged 30.85 frames per second.