Intel Xeon E5-2600 & R2000GZ Sandy Bridge-EP Server 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 v4.0 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: The Dual XEON E5-2660 processors were able to run the second pass of the benchmark at an average of 71.1 frames per second. It is definitely lower than we expected though still quite strong. The lower processor frequency a contributing factor. The first pass which is dominated by the Intel Core i7 3960X with an average of 192.4 frames per second was average at only 114.9 frames per second, this pass isn’t very heavily threaded and relies on processor frequency more than anything.