Encoding Performance
The core i7 980X Extreme really shows its strength in the HandBreak test as it was 22% faster than the Core i7 975 EE. This is an impressive result and good news for those that do heavy video editing type of work. Compared to the rest of the Core i7 lineup the 980X was 29% faster than the 960, 34% faster than the 950, and 54% faster than the 920.
The x264 HD Benchmark also shows the Intel Core i7 980X Extreme Edition offering a considerable performance gain over the Core i7 975 EE. The six-core processor was 13% faster than the latter in this benchmark with 90.3fps, while beating the Core i7 960, 950 and 920 by 18%, 24% and 39% margins, respectively.
Last but not least TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress was used for an avi to mpg conversion test, where the Intel Core i7 980X proved to be 12% quicker than the Core i7 975 EE – taking just 6:44 minutes in total versus 7.29 with the latter. The Intel Core i7 980X Extreme was 14% faster than the Core i7 960, 21% faster than the 950 and 30% faster than the Core i7 920, beating this last one by almost three minutes.