Performance Mandel FPU | x.264 transcoding

Mandel FPU test

The Mandel FPU benchmark measures double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular "Mandelbrot" fractal. The code behind this benchmark method is written in Assembly, and it is extremely optimized for every popular AMD and Intel processor core variant by utilizing the appropriate x86 or SSE2 instruction set extension.

Now if you come from the Commodore 64 / Amiga era like me (Peek & Poke Commands FTW dude!), you can probably remember rendering Mandelbrot graphics, a mathematical formula that much like a paradox, never ends and thus is repetitive. Back in the 1990s it took me a full day to complete one Mandelbrot image. Amazing where we are right now as the same set of calculations can be done in a split second & even real-time.

The FPU Mandel test again is HyperThreaded, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core aware. Again 100% baseline performance, good performance.

And the overclocked results show similar scaling ... hey man, it's free performance, so why not ?

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

x.264 movie encoding - 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 to 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. I still have to do QX9770 tests for this benchmark, hence the lack of it's performance.

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

But let's fire of some logic here. Core i7 920 = 3x faster then the 7850BE, it's however 3.5 times more expensive ... that's what you constantly need to weigh in. Product positioning versus price.

When overclocked we definitely see a gain in performance, but encoding and transcoding video is such a scenario where hyper-threading and multiple CPU cores are preferred.