Intel Core i7-980X Six-Core Processor Extreme Edition 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.

This application did fairly well when run on 12 threads, as you can see from the screen shot above. The first pass was only using about half of the processing power, but on the second pass all 12 threads were at ~95% 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 i7 980X processor was found to be 7.5% faster than the Intel Core i7 975 on the first pass, which is amazing as both processors are the same clock frequency. On the second pass the Core i7 980X processor was found to be 45% faster. Why the great jump in performance on the second pass? If you take a look at our task manager it was found that the only about 40% of the processing power is used on the first pass, but on the second pass that figure jumps up to nearly 95%.