ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme 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 ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme was able to topple the ASUS Z87-Pro in both passes of the x264 HD Video Encoding benchmark. The first pass averaged 81.6 frames per second, 1.5 frames per second faster than the ASUS Z87-Pro. The second pass was much closer, but it’s also much more processor intensive. The ECS motherboard averaged 16.5 frames per second, while the ASUS Z87-Pro averaged 16.44 frames per second.