Benchmark Results: Media Encoding And Cinebench
A four-thread Core i5-655K overclocked to 4.66 GHz takes more than eight minutes to finish our HandBrake workload, so it’s pretty impressive to see the 12-thread Core i7-980X at its stock 3.33 GHz doing the same job in almost half the time. The return on investment in upgrading to a 16-thread Xeon W5580 configuration is minimal, though the speed-up is still measureable. And switching over to the 24-thread setup is more impactful still, demonstrating how well this free application is optimized for threading.
In contrast, 24 threads is complete overkill for Xvid, which actually gives up performance as you run it on more complex hardware.
DivX is fastest on the Xeon X5680 setup, but it’s fairly clear that this one is optimized to run on fewer than 12 threads, as the Xeon W5580’s 133 MHz clock rate disadvantage is the most glaring influencer of performance here.
Optimized for up to 64 threads, Cinebench 11.5’s CPU render clearly favors the dual Xeon X5680s, demonstrating impressive scaling in the process.
In contrast, the OpenGL rendering test returns higher frame rates on the Core i7-980X, suggesting that when your workload is less processor-dependent, a more complex platform might actually be a detriment to performance.
