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 | GIGABYTE Z97X-SOC Force GIGABYTE Z97X-Gaming G1-WIFI-BK MSI Z97 Gaming 7 ASUS Z97-Deluxe 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 Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA III HD |
| Sound Card | On-board sound |
| Video Card | NVIDIA GTX 570 1.25GB ASUS Poseidon GTX 780 3GB |
| CPU Cooling | Corsair Hydro Series™ H100i Extreme Performance CPU Cooler |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA 335.23 |
| 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 a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD drive. For the Z97-based board testing, an ASUS Poseidon GTX 780 3GB video card was used for testing – both it and the GTX 570 had no effect on the benchmark tests run. 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
- Maxon Cinebench 11.5
fix the pricing section
fix the pricing section
Fixed, thanks for pointing
Fixed, thanks for pointing this out…
What i want to see is a truly
What i want to see is a truly striped down board that is meant to do nothing but overclock. I mean why would you need audio on an OC board, just fill it with PCI-e slots and plx splitters, same thing goes for the onboard video. Get rid of everything that is not needed.
I agree on no need for
I agree on no need for integrated audio, but on these consumer sockets gpu is embeded into cpu so they cannot be removed by board manufcaturers. Also there really is no need of plx chips on oc oriented boards.
don’t see why they could not
don’t see why they could not ditch the ports on the back though, put something like more usb or something there. Also plx chips would be nice of you wanted to bench 4 way gpus not by amd.
Morry, I noticed in the
Morry, I noticed in the Conclusions you noted that the CMOS battery placement was a strength. If I am running Crossfire or SLI, the CMOS battery placement in my opinion sucks, especially if I have my video cards water cooled. What exactly is an ideal place for the CMOS battery and why?
Theoretically, you could run
Theoretically, you could run SLI or CrossFire with the board without impacting the battery. Ideally, the best place for the battery is by the DIMM slots in the the lower left corner of the board, both locations which remain accessible most of the time.
If you start talking about dual or tri-card mode, there are quite a few components that become hard to get to especially when using full sized cards…
Vs it’s predecessor’s battery
Vs it’s predecessor’s battery placement, it’s definitely an improvement.
WHY WHY WHY DO THEY CONTINUE
WHY WHY WHY DO THEY CONTINUE TO PUT PCI SLOTS?!
There are not enough PCI-E
There are not enough PCI-E slots from the chipset to allocate a 1x slot to each board position. Therefore the motherboard makers have a choice of using a PCI-E 1x to 2x PCI bridge which allows for using all seven slots in the ATX spec or leaving one of the slots blank on the board. I can see why they don’t want to leave blank slots, but the slot next to the primary GPU is almost always useless anyways. Some boards also leave the first slot blank and put the primary GPU in the second slot which makes more room for the CPU cooler. and GPU backplate.
Why, oh why, did Gigabyte
Why, oh why, did Gigabyte replace the perfectly good Intel NIC with this killer rubbish? When you ran the network tests, did you have the killer bloatware installed, or just the driver? Also, how exactly was the CPU utilization measured? Does your percentage include the CPU overhead from the simultaneous disk I/O too?
For the network testing, the
For the network testing, the Killer software was installed in addition to the driver. For measuring CPU utilization, Windows Performance Monitor was used with the average measured from that taken as the reported average…