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 Z97-Machine
ASUS Maximus VII Formula
MSI Z97 XPower
GIGABYTE Z97X-Gaming G1-WIFI-BK
ASUS Maximus VI Formula
Memory Stock Testing
Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 modules
(1600MHz, 9-10-9-27-1T, 1.525V)

Z97 Overclock Testing
Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-2400 modules
(2400MHz, 11-13-13-31-1T, 1.65V)
Hard Drive Intel 730 240GB SSD
Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD
Intel 520 240GB 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 includes an Intel Core i7-4770K CPU, 16GB of DDR3-1866 memory, an NVIDIA GTX 570 1.25GB video card or an ASUS Poseidon GTX 780 3GB video card, and a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB or an Intel 520 or 730 240GB SSD drive. The differing video cards and SSDs exhibited similar performance across all benchmarks run, having negligible effects on the results numbers reported. 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
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