Testing Configuration and Benchmarks Used
To verify that the motherboard works as advertised, the board was run through our standard benchmark suite. In most cases, the results are presented for the motherboard under review as well as a different similar-class motherboard for performance comparison purposes. The benchmark tests used should give you a good understanding of the board’s capabilities for both office and gaming use so that you, the reader, can make a more informed purchasing decision.
Test System Setup |
|
CPU |
Intel Core i7-4770K (3.5GHz, 35 x 100MHz Base Clock) |
Motherboards |
EVGA Z87 Stinger GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force MSI Z87 XPower |
Memory |
Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 modules (1600MHz, 9-10-9-27-1T) |
Hard Drive |
Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD Intel 520 240GB SSD Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA III HD |
Sound Card |
Onboard sound |
Video Card |
NVIDIA GTX 570 1.25GB |
CPU Cooling |
Corsair Hydro Series™ H100i Extreme Performance CPU Cooler |
Video Drivers |
NVIDIA 320.18 |
Power Supply |
Corsair HX750 |
Operating System |
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 |
Test Setup Explanation
The 64-bit Windows 7 based test bench used for Intel Z87 LGA1150 board testing includes an Intel Core i7-4770K CPU, 16GB of DDR3-1866 memory, an NVIDIA GTX 570 1.25GB video card, and an Intel 520 240GB or a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD drive (the two SSD drives were found to perform the same in testing). Using the selected components gives us the ability to demonstrate the motherboard's capabilities rather than that of the components themselves.
Benchmark Tests used for evaluation:
- SiSoft Sandra 2012
- LinX Intel Linpack Benchmark v0.6.4
- Handbrake video transcoder v0.9.8
- Maxon Cinebench 11.5
- FutureMark PCMark 7
How was the onboard sound?
How was the onboard sound? Did you notice anything good or bad with SB integrated?
No audio testing was done in
No audio testing was done in the base review unfortunately…