Multimedia, Compression and Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks
X264 FHD
x264 is a free software library for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. x264 FHD measures how efficient a system is in encoding H.264 video and produces results in frames-per-second. H.265/HEVC video encoding is the future of video able to compress significantly larger resolution videos including 4K and make streaming a possibility. On the Z390 Aorus Pro, our 9900k ran the x264 FHD benchmark at an average of 58.1 frames per second. On the Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce, the 9900k runs the X264 FHD benchmark at an average of 61.55 frames per second. The lower temps allowed us to squeeze a but more performance out of our 9900k.
X265
x265 is an open-source implementation of the H.265 standard and x.265 HD benchmark tests the CPU’s ability to process an HEVC video. This benchmark is run by the processor alone. Like other benchmarks, the 9900k did slightly better on the Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce than it did on the Z390 Aorus Pro. On the Z390 Aorus Pro, the 9900k averaged 35.96 frames per second. On the Z390 Aorus Waterforce, the 9900k averaged 38.12 frames per second.
7-Zip
The 7-zip benchmark shows a rating in MIPS (million instructions per second). The rating value is calculated from the measured speed, and it is normalized with results of Intel Core 2 CPU with multi-threading option switched off. So, if you have modern CPU from Intel or AMD, rating values in single-thread mode must be close to real CPU frequency. There are two tests, compression with LZMA method and decompression with LZMA method. Once the total passes reach 100, the score is taken. 7-Zip gives the resulting score for decompressing, compressing and an overall score. The 7-Zip benchmark gave us the largest variant between the two motherboards. At first, I thought this was a fluke. I ran the 7-Zip benchmark 5 times on the Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce and three times on the Z390 Aorus Pro. I went with the result with the best total rating scores for each motherboard. On the Z390 Aorus Pro, the total rating score was 49454. On the Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce, the best total rating score was 72809.
WINRAR
WinRAR is a file archiver utility for Windows, developed by Eugene Roshal of win.rar GmbH. It can create and view archives in RAR or ZIP file formats and unpack numerous archive file formats. Our 9900k on the Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce did substantially better than it did on the Z390 Aorus Pro. On the Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce, our 9900k achieved a resulting speed on 27303 KB/s compared to the resulting speed of 21373 KB/s on the Z390 Aorus Pro.
Handbrake
HandBrake is a free and open-source video transcoder, originally developed in 2003 by Eric Petit to make ripping a film from a DVD to a data storage device easier. Essentially, it can convert video to almost any modern format. HandBrake is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The workload video file is a ~6.27 GB, 3840 x 1714, 73.4 Mbps, 24fps, H.264, .mov video file that is transcoded to a ~1480 MB, 1920×858, ~17.1 Mbps, 24fps, H.264, .mp4 video file. The File was transcoded by the 9900k on the Z390 Aorus Pro in 5 minutes and 30 seconds. This was 28 seconds slower than on the Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce. The 28-second difference doesn’t seem like much. However, considering the only difference was the board and the cooling, its a pretty big difference.
