Encoding is something most of us do on a fairly regular basis and it is a good way to monitor system performance.
One of our favourite tools is the excellent, free Handbrake. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
We extracted a VOB file from the DVD of AVATAR and then converted it to MP4 at quality settings.
These are very impressive results, especially when overclocked, 6 and a half minutes is an amazing result, especially when a 965BE can take around 12 minutes to finish the same task.
With a 1.6ghz overclock the 1055T really delivers a killer end result achieving a final time under 11 minutes, more than one minute faster when running at reference speeds. The overclocked 980x in comparison takes around 8 and a half minutes to achieve the same thing. 970 at reference speeds takes around 9 minutes and 12 seconds, with an improvement of 24 seconds when overclocked.