Handbrake Media Encoding

It's a truism that consumer-level computer performance reached the "fast enough" point years ago, where increases in system performance don't make thing any faster for most people. Web browsing, e-mail, word processing, and even most games won't benefit dramatically from a super-fast CPU. There are some exceptions, though, and media encoding is one of them: transcoding video, especially high-definition video, can bring the strongest system to its knees. Fortunately, media transcoding is one of those things that (depending on the design of the code, of course) that scales really well with both clock speed and the number of cores, so the more you have of both, the better your results will be.

The free and open-source Handbrake 0.95 video transcoder is an example of a program that makes full use of the computational resources available. For this test I used Handbrake 0.95 to transcode a standard-definition episode of Family Guy to the "iPhone & iPod Touch" presets, and recorded the total time (in seconds) it took to transcode the video.

The ASUS boards beat the Intel DX79SI by about 8% at stock clock speeds, and overclocking improves the P9X79's score by 14% and the Sabertooth's score by 9%.

x264 HD Benchmark 3.19

Tech ARP's x264 HD Benchmark comprises the Avisynth video scripting engine, an x264 encoder, a sample 720P video file, and a script file that actually runs the benchmark. The script invokes four two-pass encoding runs and reports the average frames per second encoded as a result. The script file is a simple batch file, so you could edit the encoding parameters if you were interested, although your results wouldn't then be comparable to others.

Here's another test where overclocking really helps. The frames per second score of the ASUS motherboards increases by 15% and 20% in Run 1, and by 14% and 20% in Run 2.

Overclocking brings improvements of 18% and 10% for the P9X79 and Sabertooth boards in Runs 3 and 4.

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