AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, 1700X and 1700 Processor Review
Media Encoding & Encryption Benchmarks
HandBrake v1.0.1 – link
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It is popular today as it allows you to transcode multiple input video formats to h.264 output format and is highly multithreaded. We used Big Buck Bunny as our input file, which has become one of the world standards for video benchmarks. For our benchmark scenario we used a standard 2D 4K (3840×2160) 60 FPS clip in the MP4 format and used Handbrake version 1.0.1 to do two things.
We used the new Fast 1080p30 preset to shrink that down to a 1920 x 1080 video clip to reduce the file size. This is something people often do to save space to put movies onto mobile devices. We also ran the workload using the normal preset as it puts the CPU at a higher load than the Fast 1080p30 preset.
X264 HD Encoding – link
the x264 HD Benchmark is a reproducible measure of how fast your machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. Its 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. We are using x264 HD v5.0.1 for this test.
Media Encoding Benchmark Results Summary: AMD has shown that the AMD Ryzen 1800X CPU does well in Handbrake, but we found it to be slightly behind the Intel Core i7-6900K in our tests. We benchmark two workloads because we found that transcoding to a different native resolution that then original video didn’t put the CPU at 100% load across all threads, but in the ‘normal’ legacy test the resolution stays the same and the CPU is fully utilized. In the Fast 1080p30 test the 1800X was 2.8% slower, but was 26% slower when all the CPUs were being used. Strangly enough, the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X beat the Intel Core i7-6900K in the X264 benchmark test on the important second pass, but got its lunch handed to it on the quicker first pass. Media encoding is certainly a strong point for Ryzen 7 and many will be purchasing one of these processors as it can save you a ton of rendering/processing time!
VeraCrypt 1.19 – link
VeraCrypt is an open-source disk encryption software brought to you by IDRIX and is a fork based on the discontinued TrueCrypt 7.1a utility. The developers claim that weaknesses found in TrueCrypt have been resolved with the VeraCrypt project. This is a popular utility used by people that don’t want to use Microsoft’s built-in encyption tool for Windows 10 called Bitlocker.
Encryption Benchmark Results Summary: If encryption is something you do, you’ll find having more cores and threads to be very beneficial as you can see from the results above. The AMD Ryzen 7 1800X finished with a score of 5.6 GB/s on the standard AES benchmark, which is just ahead of a stock Intel Core i7-7700K, but far behind the Intel Core i7-6900K.