MAXON CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's 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 therefor, it can render about x2 faster the test image, we could say. The highest score comes from Asus Extreme Striker II with 9686 points at xCPU test and from the Asus Maximus Extreme at the 1x CPU test.

- 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. There are two kinds of results, one for the first pass another for the second. The average performance is illustrated in the table below.

The x264 HD benchmark tests the cpu/HDD subsystems. There are two passes with slightly different results. In both cases, the Asus Maximus Extreme had the highest performance.

- TMPGEnc 4 Xpress

TMPGEnc came from Tsunami MPEGEncoder. "QUALITY" comes before everything in TMPGEnc! Encoding time will automatically be faster as CPU speed gets faster! The software 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 bitrate, 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 use the build-in Mpeg4 ASP/AVC MediaEncoder profile and by dividing the total frames via the encoding time, we get the average frame/sec speed of each competent.

The test gave us some interesting results. In the ASP encoding test, the X48 chipset got the highest score, while the AVC encoding profile gave the Asus Maximus Extreme the pole position.