ASUS Z97-A Motherboard Review

Test System and Testing Procedures

Latest working BIOS, updates and drivers were used at the time of the review. Each test was conducted at least three times for accuracy.

Comparison benchmarks in this review are shown between the stock performance, Auto-OC TPU (ratio boost) performance and manual multiplier overclock of 4.5GHz at 1.28Vcore. This is the maximum overclock achievable on this specific chip on a tower air cooler without throttling under AIDA64 stability test load  (although it can safely boot up to 4.7GHz with 1.375Vcore with a custom water loop). This will also serve as a baseline OC test for cross comparison with other Z97 motherboards down the road.

Tests conducted are separated in three sections: System benchmarks (CPU benchmarks, memory tests, compression benchmarks, media encoding and 3D rendering tests), Subsystem testing (storage, network and audio performance tests), and Gaming Benchmarks (semi-synthetic and real gameplay tests).

System Benchmarks

• wPrime 1.55 32M
• Aida64 Engineer 4.30.2900
• CineBench R15
• PCMark 8 v2.0.228
• WinRAR 5.01
• Handbrake 0.9.9
• x264 FHD 1.0.1

Subsystem Testing

• CrystalDisk Mark for SATA and USB 3.0 tests
• DPC Latency
• Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.4.0
• Passmark Performance Test 8.0 – Network Speed Graph
• JPerf 2.0.2
• LAN Speed Test 3.4

Gaming Benchmarks

• 3DMark11 v1.0.132 – Performance and Extreme Preset
• 3DMark (Firestrike test) v1.2.362 – Default Preset
• Tomb Raider – Built-in Benchmark, Low preset on 800×600, Max preset on 1920×1080
• Bioshock Infinite – Built-in Benchmark, Low preset on 640×480, Max preset on 1920×1080
• Sleeping Dogs – Built-in Benchmark, Low preset on 640×480
• Unigine Heaven 4.0 – Built-in Benchmark, DX11 Low preset on 640×480