Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5

TMPGEnc Xpress 4.7

When it comes to video transcoding, one of the best offerings on the market is TMPGEnc Xpress. Although a bit pricey, the software offers an incredible amount of flexibility and customization, not to mention superb format support. From the get go, you can output to DivX, DVD, Video-CD, Super Video-CD, HDV, QuickTime, MPEG, and more. It even goes as far as to include support for Blu-ray video!

There are a few reasons why we choose to use TMPGEnc for our tests. The first relates to the reasons laid out above. The sheer ease of use and flexibility is appreciated. Beyond that, the application does us a huge favor by tracking the encoding time, so that we can actually look away while an encode is taking place and not be afraid that we’ll miss the final encoding time. Believe it or not, not all transcoding applications work like this.

For our test, we take a 3.99GB RAW (FRAPS) AVI video of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 gameplay with stereo audio and transcode it to Windows Media format, 20Mbit/s, at the native resolution of 1080p.

You can’t get much closer than this, literally.

SPECviewperf 11

SPEC, short for Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, is an organization comprised of market-leading vendors with the sole purpose of developing realistic benchmarks that can be used to gauge the performance of hardware of all sorts, from full-blown workstations to individual components, such as CPUs and GPUs, along with memory subsystems and so forth.

SPECviewperf is one of the organization’s flagship benchmarks which focuses on OpenGL viewport performance. For those who might be unaware, a viewport is the main screen developers handle when designing new products, or renders, and in order for fluid motion, the action must be smooth. As the vast majority of viewports for industry use utilize OpenGL (because of its cross-platform nature), and therefore performance results from this benchmark are important.

This isn’t so much a great motherboard benchmark as it is a gauge for overall stability. Since this is a rather intensive test, it helps us out in making sure that there are no faults to be seen.

As expected, both boards delivered nearly the same performance throughout all of the tests. Interestingly, though, the 790FXT inched just ahead of the 890FXA overall.