GIGABYTE Z87X-UD5 TH Intel Z87 Thunderbolt Motherboard Review

By Dan Stoltz

X264 HD Video Encoding Benchmark

x264 HD 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.

x264 HD Encoding Benchmark

This application did fairly well when run on 8 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.

x264 HD Video Encoding Benchmark Results

Benchmark Results: In the x264 HD Video Encoding benchmark the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD5 TH continued its reign over the other Intel Z87 chipset motherboards. The first pass which isn’t the most processor intensive averaged out to 85.65 frames per second. During the second pass, the Z87X-UD5 TH averaged 17.42 frames per second. These aren’t huge differences between the boards but it’s certainly worth noting.