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.
Using the latest edition of the x264 HD benchmark, the PC encodes a high quality x264 1080p movie clip and we can see that in the first pass, the A8-5600K performs marginally better than the A8-3870K, a role reversal when compared to the older edition of this benchmark.
