Media Encoding Tests

Handbrake


Known mainly for its DVD re-encoding prowess, our test uses the Handbrake command line interface on a full DVD rip to gauge CPU performance.

Intel Core i7-6950X 10-core Broadwell-E Review - Processors 9


 
Our Handbrake testing is clearly limited in its multi-threaded capability somewhat, as both the Core i7-6950X and Core i7-5960X are slightly behind the higher clocked Core i7-6700K with only four cores.

 

x264 HD Benchmark


The popular x264 benchmark available from graysky does a two-pass H.264 encode on 1080p video.  The first pass appears to be more clock-sensitive while the second pass is more heavily threaded.

Intel Core i7-6950X 10-core Broadwell-E Review - Processors 10

(Screenshot shows 720p testing from v4.0, we are using 1080p on v5.0)

The x264 encoding benchmark doens't have the same issue as our Handbrake workload – the Core i7-6950X is 22% faster than the Core i7-5960X and 48% faster than the flagship Skylake CPU. If you happen to be one of the many users sitting on that Core i7-2600K, this new part is 2.2x faster; those of you on the Core i7-3820 (Sandy Bridge-E) are in a similar boat.
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