AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Processor Review

Media Encoding & Encryption Benchmarks

HandBrake v1.1.1 – 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 1.1.1 with the 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.

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: Sadly, neither Handbrake v1.1.1 nor the x264 encoding benchmark are able to properly handle more than 32-threads at this point in time. We disabled SMT on the 2990WX and the performance was basically the same, so we didn’t put that on the chart. Performance on the 2990WX is not where we wanted it to be with SMT enabled on the x264 HD benchmark. By turning off SMT we were able to improve performance by nearly 15 FPS on the second pass!

SiSoftware Sandra Platinum 2018 Cryptography: link

SiSoftware Sandra Platinum is a utility, which includes remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, mobile devices and networks. This test has been popular for CPU and memory benchmarks for well over a decade and it is one of the easiest benchmarks out there to run.

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.