Real world Tests 3

WinRAR performance

One of the oldest applications in the book actually has a nice benchmark included in it. What's real nice about it is that it pretty sensitive towards system changes, such as memory. An excellent tool to have included into this memory test.

WinRAR is pretty fun to measure with and here we land at an application where memory bandwidth really matters, and that shows. The faster we have the memory frequency and bandwidth, the better the performance. Roughly 4500 KB/sec the G.Skill kit. Realistically, once you pass 1600 MHz on the memory, the differences are just very small.

But hey now .. let's see if a high memory frequency effects encoding high-definition x.264 files.

Multi-threaded Video Transcoding H.264 (DD5.1)  to x.264 AC3 5.1

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 MKV 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.

x.264 movie encoding, we recently introduced  this new test here at Guru3D at the request of our audience, x.264 encoding. 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.

As you can observe, the test does show a measurable effect on transcoding your high-definition content towards MKV media containers. But realistically .. the effect is really small as the transcoding processes remains within a 1 FPS differential which boils down to a 4-5% performance benefit.

Still .. that's also 4 to 5% benefit on transcoding time. But hey, let's try out some games.