Intel Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E Processor 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 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: In the x264 HD Video encoding benchmark the Intel Core i7-4960X was 7.8% faster in the second pass and 8.3% faster in the less CPU intensive first pass when compared to the Core i7-3960X. The Core i7-4960X was 33% faster than the Core i7-4770K ‘Haswell’ processor in this benchmark, so you can see the strength of the LGA2011 platform here versus the LGA1150 platform.