http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=442

I think it's ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process, and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently.

You'll notice that the whole thing is pretty simple since I have no programming skills to speak of. The test basically, consists of the needed executables, the video file, the AVISynth script, and the DGIndex project file. They are all driven by a batch file that'll kick off the x264 encode, and write the results to text file. That makes it easy for you to upload the results, together with your machine specifications for comparison.

The video content itself is not important. It is just a DVD-formatted, progressive MPEG-2 stream running at 23.976 fps with a resolution of 720x480. The important thing is that all those participating in this test use the same clip, the same version of x264, the same version of Avisynth etc. so that the results are comparable.