Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400MHz 32GB Memory Kit Review

x264 HD Encoding

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 scales across many threads and is ideal for processors with Intel Hyper-Threading or a bunch of cores.

Benchmark Results: The x264 HD v5.0.1 benchmark showed that at 2133MHz with CL14 timings we were averaging 98.96 FPS on pass 1 and 27.49 FPS on pass 2. When we set the UEFI/BIOS to XMP Profile #1 we were seeing 106.81 FPS on pass 1 and 29.14 FPS on pass 2 at 2400MHz with CL16 timings. This is a 6.0% performance increase on the second pass with the memory running at 2400MHz versus 2133MHz. Once you get beyond 2133MHz it doesn’t appear that X264 needs any additional bandwidth. We were a little shocked that the Crucial kit running at 2666MHz with CL12 timings didn’t have any real performance increase over the testing at 2666Mhz with CL16 timings. If you do video work you’ll really want to consider a DDR4 memory kit with clock speeds above 2133MHz as it will save you significant time on your rendering jobs over the years and many people are buying Haswell-E platforms for CPU intensive tasks like that.