GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H Intel Z87 ‘Haswell’ 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 squeeze out a slight lead over the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H during the first pass of the x264 HD Video benchmark, though we’re talking about less than .5%. The roles were reversed on the second pass where the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H was .03 frames per second or less than .2% faster. Both of the Intel ‘Haswell’ systems were more than 10 frames per second faster than the ‘Ivy Bridge’ system during the first pass and 3.8 frames per second faster during the second pass.