Intel Core i3-2120 3.3GHz Sandy Bridge Processor Review

x264 HD Encoding

Simply put, it 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 v4.0 for this test.

This application did fairly well when run on 4 threads, as you can
see from the screen shot above. The first pass was not using all of the processing power available on the four cores, but on the second pass all 4 threads were at
~98% load.

Benchmark Results:
The x264 HD benchmark is said to be ideal for a benchmark because the
application reports fairly accurate compression results for each pass of
the video encoding process, and it uses multi-core processors very
efficiently. The Intel Core i3-2105 and the Core i3-2120 both do well in this test, but are lower than the AMD A8-3850 APU. Keep in mind that the Intel Core i3-2105 and Core i3-2120 are both dual-core processors with hyper-threading and the AMD A8-3850 is a true quad-core processor. The extra 200MHz core clock gave the Core i3-2120 a 7% performance lead over the Core i3-2105 in this x86 CPU intensive benchmark.