MAXON CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's award-winning animation software, CINEMA 4D, which is used by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such and Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. MAXON CINEBENCH runs several tests on your computer to measure the performance of the main processor and the graphics card under real world circumstances. The benchmark application makes use of up to 16 CPUs or CPU cores and is available for Windows (32-bit and 64-Bit) and Macintosh (PPC and Intel-based). The resulting values among different operating systems are 100% comparable and therefore very useful with regard to purchasing decision-making.

The CineBench R10 benchmark uses all four cores of Intel Q9300 and therefore, it can render the test image x2 times faster. The Gigabyte EP45-DS3R had the second best performance in both sub tests.

- x264 HD Benchmark

x264 Benchmark utilizes the next generation of Video Encoding benchmarks with support for x264 codec that is considered to be one of the most demanding for Video applications. Simply put, it is a reproducible measure of fast your machine can encode a short, HD video clip to a high quality x264 video file. It's nice because everyone running it will use the identical video clip and software. The video encoder (x264.exe) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other.

The benchmark procedure is very simple, you just run a batch file that encodes the same file four times.

The Gigabyte EP45-DS3R was slightly faster that the Asus motherboards in both encoding passes.

- TMPGEnc 4 Xpress

TMPGEnc is based on the Tsunami MPEGEncoder. TMPGEnc converts *.AVI files to MPEG1, the format which is used in VideoCDs. Using a variety of options in TMPGEnc, you can compress your video file in high quality. TMPGEnc enables you to adjust bit rate, quantize matrix, GOP structure, interlacing and many other parameters so that you can create the most appropriate movie file depending on your needs.

For our test we used a 350MB AVI file encoded with the Xvid (Mpeg4 ASP) codec. We used the in Mpeg4 ASP/AVC MediaEncoder profile and by dividing the total frames via the needed encoded time, we get the average frame/sec speed of each processor.

The TMPGEnc 4 Xpress results were slightly different than what we got from the x264 HD benchmark. The Gigabyte EP45-DS3R had the highest score in the ASP encoding, while the Asus Blitz Formula was better in the AVC encoding subtest.