HandBrake Video Transcode

We've added HandBrake to our list of media creation tests, as PCMark 8's video encoding test isn't able to make use of more than two threads and as such doesn't give a true representation of video encoding/editing workloads and performance. As this task is a key reason for opting for a powerful system, we've added a simple encoding test using the freely available HandBrake software, which converts a 60-second, 400MB, 4K, MKV video sample to a high quality 1080p MP4 file using the available presets. Our results show much better scaling with increasing threads, which is more indicative of high-performance video editing suites, albeit without any GPU acceleration.

PCMark 10 Photo Editing V2

This workload involves making a series of adjustments to a set of photographs using ImageMagik - an open-source image processing library - to adjust settings such as brightness, contrast, saturation and gamma. When a favourable balance is found, the changes are then applied to the rest of the images in the set. RAW files over 70MB in size are used and the program uses more filters than in PCMark 8.

CPU-Z

Publisher Cpuid.com

The popular tool for identifying key system information such as realtime CPU frequency, voltage, BIOS version memory speed, and a whole load of other figures, also includes a built-in benchmark tool. This assesses both single and multi-threaded performance in an extremely quick test directly within the usual interface. It also offers a stress test and the ability to limit the number of threads being benchmarked. We use the default settings and obtain both single and multi-threaded results. The version we use is 1.79 and results are not compatible with previous versions as outlined here.