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 0.96 video transcoder is an example of a program that makes full use of the computational resources available. For this test I used Handbrake 0.96 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.

Not much to see here. OC Genie and manual overclocking reduces the encoding time in this benchmark by 19% and 29%, respectively.

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.

Same rankings...

...and in the last two runs as well. On average, my manual overclock increased the scores by about 37% across all runs.

<< Previous Page - Next Page >>