This time, we will compare hardware encoding using QSV on the popular mini PC.

No one has done a comparative review because no one is encoding on such a low-performance PC. The two mini PCs used are as follows. They are on sale at Amazon's time sale.

①GMKtec NucBox3 (Intel Celeron J4125+UHD graphics600 & DDR4 8GB)

②SkyBrium Intel miniPC (Intel N100+Core UHD graphics & LPDDR5 8GB)

First, we will compare the difference in PC performance due to actual use with Cinebench R23.

It's almost the same as other review blogs. Multi-performance is 1.65 times, single performance is 2.12 times.

Even though it has the same 4 cores and 4 threads, the N100's single-thread improvement, which is a feature of the 12th generation CPU, is truly amazing.

For encoding, we used HandBrake 1.6.1, which has been significantly improved with the version upgrade.

The source video is interlaced mpeg2 with two resolutions, 480i and 1080i. The preset was Genral's Super HQ, with the deinterlacing Decomb default in the Filter tab, and H.264 (QSV) and H.265 (QSV) in the Video tab.

HandBrake's QSV encoding has different encoding speeds depending on the CPU, GPU, and memory. I wonder if the performance difference in the benchmark is reflected in the QSV encoding. In particular, QSV is memory-dependent, so I'm personally curious to see if it will be faster due to the difference between DDR4 and DDR5.

[HandBrake QSV comparison results for mini PCs]

I chose a short video because I thought 1080i would take a long time. In this comparison, H.264 480i was about 1.65 times faster, the same as the multi-performance difference in the Cinebench R23 benchmark, and 1080i was about 3 times faster. This must be due to the single performance of the N100 and the speed of DDR5.

However, the encoding speed seems to have hit a plateau, perhaps due to the limitations of a mini PC. The J4125 shows a difference between H.264 and H.265, but the N100 is almost the same speed. Conversely, the N100 can be said to be as fast as H.264 even with H.265. For storage, H.265 is by far the better quality.

The file size of the N100 is smaller, probably because the encoding performance has improved with the new generation GPU.

That's why I was surprised that it was faster than I expected, but if you use QSV encoding with the intel ARC A380 on your main PC, you can encode about 10 times faster than the Celeron J4125. No one makes such a comparison.

But the N100 is really amazing. And even with this, the built-in GPU supports AV1 hardware decoding, which is becoming the standard on YouTube. It would have been great if it could encode, but for a PC in the 20,000 yen range, it's enough. I'm glad I bought it.

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