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

ECS Z87H3-A3X
ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme
GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force

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:

  • SoftPerfect Research NetWorx Speed Test
  • LanBench v1.1.0
  • ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.47
  • SiSoft Sandra 2012
  • LinX Intel Linpack Benchmark v0.6.4
  • Handbrake video transcoder v0.9.8
  • Maxon Cinebench 11.5
  • FutureMark PCMark 7
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