Asus ROG Maximus V Gene Z77 w/ Intel i7 3770K Review

1. Introduction2. Intel i7 3770k3. Asus ROG Maximus V Gene Z774. Asus ROG Maximus V Gene Z77 (Super High Res Gallery)5. Bios and Overclocking6. Testing Methodology7. Synthetic: PCMark 78. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage9. Synthetic: 3DMark 1110. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark11. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201112. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit13. Synthetic: SSD Performance14. Real World: 3D Rendering15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Real World: HandBrake 9.517. Gaming: Resident Evil 5 (HD4000)18. Gaming: Far Cry 2 (HD4000)19. Gaming: Total War Shogun 2 (HD4000)20. Gaming: F1 2011 (HD4000)21. Power Consumption22. Closing Thoughts23. View All Pages

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version which has been optimised for Sandybridge processors.

We disable then enable onboard Intel graphics acceleration.

Media Espresso does not use 100% of all the cores, so therefore the results above don’t tie in accurately with some of the other software today.

Disabling all hardware acceleration when using the latest version of Mediaespresso causes huge performance penalties for the 3770k, as shown above. Enabling all hardware functionality shortens the time taken to only 8 minutes and 40 seconds, on a par with the Core i7 3960X EE at reference clocks.

Enabling hardware acceleration not only reduces the rendering time but it lowers the demand on the compute core, dropping from over 60 percent average, to around 20 percent average. Enabling hardware acceleration would allow the 3770k to multitask with a variety of other tasks.

We measured the power at the wall from the system when handling the encoding above, with hardware acceleration enabled. The system was demanding between 89 watts and 96 watts, which is extremely efficient considering the performance.

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