Intel Core i9-7900X Processor Review
Media Encoding & Encryption Benchmarks
HandBrake v1.0.1 – link
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It is popular today as it allows you to transcode multiple input video formats to h.264 output format and is highly multithreaded. We used Big Buck Bunny as our input file, which has become one of the world standards for video benchmarks. For our benchmark scenario we used a standard 2D 4K (3840×2160) 60 FPS clip in the MP4 format and used Handbrake version 1.0.1 to do two things.
We used the new Fast 1080p30 preset to shrink that down to a 1920 x 1080 video clip to reduce the file size. This is something people often do to save space to put movies onto mobile devices. We also ran the workload using the normal preset as it puts the CPU at a higher load than the Fast 1080p30 preset.
X264 HD Encoding – link
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. Its 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.
Media Encoding Benchmark Results Summary: Our media tests showed that the Intel Core i9-7900X is a force to be reckoned with and bested the Core i7-6950X at times. It really depends on what settings you are using in Handbrake as the CPU load varies greatly on the profile that is being used. In X264 the 7900X dominated the 6950X and was an impressive 20% faster on the second pass!
VeraCrypt 1.19 – link
VeraCrypt is an open-source disk encryption software brought to you by IDRIX and is a fork based on the discontinued TrueCrypt 7.1a utility. The developers claim that weaknesses found in TrueCrypt have been resolved with the VeraCrypt project. This is a popular utility used by people that don’t want to use Microsoft’s built-in encyption tool for Windows 10 called Bitlocker.
Encryption Benchmark Results Summary: If encryption is something you do, you’ll find having more cores and threads to be very beneficial as you can see from the results above. The higher core clock frequency on the Intel Core i9-7900X give this new processor a good lead over the Intel Core i7-6950X.