ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition Intel X79 Motherboard Review

X264 HD Video Encoding Benchmark

Simply put, 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. 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. We are using x264 HD v5.0.1 for this test.

This application did fairly well when run on 12 threads, as you can see from the screen shot above. The first pass was not using all of the processing power available on the cores, but on the second pass all 12 threads were at ~95% load.

Benchmark Results: The ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition averaged 114.94 frames per second on the first pass of the x264 HD Video encoding benchmark while the MSI Big Bang XPower II was 2 frames per second slower with an average of 112.89 frames per second. The second pass which is a quite a bit more processor intensive gave the X79 platforms a bit more of a challenge and brought the average rendering speed down to 23.24 frames per second on the ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition, a hair faster than the Big Bang XPower II which averaged 23.13 frames per second.