Intel Core i9-7980XE 18-Core 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 as it keeps it at 4K.

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.

Cinegy Cinescore 10.4 Professional Video Encoding Benchmark:

The broadcast and media industry needs benchmarks that are meaningful and relevant. Cinegy Cinescore uses many commonly used professional quality codecs to measure the encoding speed of a system. This sets expectations of how many channels a given machine can capture, how suitable it is for e.g. UHD editing, or which speed can be expected to do transcode jobs. Cinegy Cinescore covers a fair number of commonly used formats and codecs and measures the encoding speed as well as the system load for doing that for the different target resolutions – HD, UHD and 8K.

Media Encoding Benchmark Results Summary: One might have expected a blow out for the Intel Core i9-7980XE in these tests, but the 7980XE didn’t was behind the AMD Threadripper 1950X in Handbrake and barely ahead in the x264 behcmark. The new Cingey Cinescore benchmarks that we just added to our test suite in our AMD Threadripper review to show 8K video results showed that the Intel Core i9-7980XE was able to beat the AMD Threadripper 1950X at 1080P, 4K and 8K!

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 Intel Core i9-7980XE has more cores than anything else we have ever tested, so it is an easy win.