ASUS Republic Of Gamers Maximus VI Hero Intel Z87 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 ROG Maximus VI Hero was able to edge out the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H by a small margin on the first pass with an average rate of 85.253 FPS vs 84.83 FPS. The second pass the roles were reversed and the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H was able to take a slight lead with an average of 16.363 FPS vs the Hero’s 17.333 FPS. Both systems were quite a bit faster than the Intel Z77 system which had a first pass average of 74.35 FPS and a second pass average of 14.533 frames per second.