x.264 movie encoding - we introduce a new test here at Guru3D at the request of our audience, x.264 encoding.

x264 is a free library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams. Encoding/transcoding to that format is one of the most intensive tasks a processor can perform. As such this probably is the best test of the entire review.  We encode a h.264 Dolby Digital 1080P trailer of 150 MB towards Matroska x.264 with 5.1 channels AC3. It's compressed in such a way you can play it back with Haali media splitter and/or FFDSHOW codecs. We use handbrake software which is multi-core aware .. the more processor cores it sees, the faster it can, and will transcode. This software also is a perfect benchmark for CPU and memory testing.

The displayed numbers is the number of frames render per second measure averaged out over the encoding process. The higher the number, the faster performance is.

Since this is a new test I also took the liberty of including the Core i7 940 and 965 processors, which obviously are completely out of range for this review (500 and 999 USD per processor) of today's tested products price wise.

Now if you look at the 175 USD X4 810 and compare it to the Q6600 (189 USD), then you immediately see what is better value. The X3 720 has a bit of a rough time with one core less but is very close to the Q6600 while being a massive amount cheaper. I hope to add some Core 2 Duo results soon.

Overclocked we spot the X3 720 BE at 3700 MHz matching the Phenom II X4 920. And the X4 810 matches the Phenom II X4 940 when clocked a little faster to 3.0 GHz. Pretty sweet value really.