Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. What's x264, you ask? It's more or less the next-generation Xvid/DivX codec. I think it's ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process, and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently.
x264 HD gives results for 2 passes when compressing an MPEG-2 clip into x264. It presents 4 seperate results for each pass giving a total of 8 - all results are given in FPS. For each pass I have averaged out the results.
The P8P67 produced the best P67 performance in this test the last time round, now the Sabertooth is able to outperform the P8P67 and stretch the ASUS lead over the other boards tested. Overclocking with the Sabertooth gives very good gains, and if you encode frequently you'll understand that this could save you some time. Overclocking performance on the Sabertooth is much better than we were able to achieve with the overclocked CPU in the P8P67 in this test.
