Testing Configuration and Benchmarks Used

We threw together a couple P67 and Z68 motherboards to taken on ASRock’s Z68 Extreme 7 Gen 3. We used three boards from MSI – the Z68A-GD80, P67A-GD80 and  P67A-GD65 – to see if there were any performance boosts to be gained from the improvements to the board’s chipset and feature set. We also used another one of ASRock’s boards that was released this year – the Fatality P67 Professional. All of these motherboards are between the mid-range and high-end classes and should provide adequate competition for the Z68 Extreme 7 Gen 3 in our gauntlet of benchmarks.

 

CPU-Z screenshots 

 

Test System Setup

CPU

Intel i5-2500K (running at 3.3GHz, 100×33)

Motherboards

MSI Z68A-GD80

MSI P67A-GD65

MSI P67A-GD80

ASRock Fatality P67 Professional 

ASRock Z68 Extreme 7 Gen 3

Memory 

Patriot Sector 5 (2 x 2GB) DDR3-2000 Dual Channel

Hard Drive

Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10,000 RPM SATA 3GB/s 

Sound Card

Onboard sound

Video Card

XFX Radeon HD 5770 512MB

CPU Cooling

Zalman CNPS10X Flex

Video Drivers

AMD ATI Catalyst 11.9
Power Supply PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750w 

DirectX Version

DX11/ DX10 / DX9c

Operating System

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

 

Our 64-bit test bench for the LGA 1155 Sandy Bridge processors includes 4GBs of dual-channel DDR3 2000 memory, an XFX Radeon HD 5770 512MB graphics card, and a Western Digital Raptor 150GB SATA 3GB/s hard drive for storage. This configuration is based off a typical mid-range users LGA 1155 system and focuses on evaluating the motherboard’s capabilities and less on the rest of the hardware components.

 

Benchmarks used:

– SiSoft Sandra 2011 

– CineBench 11.5 64-bit 

– Handbrake DVD compression

– 3DMark Vantage 

– 3DMark11 Professional

– Metro 2033

– Just Cause 2 

– PCMark Vantage

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