ASUS Z97-A Motherboard Review

System Benchmarks

wPrime is a good quick CPU-sensitive multi-threaded math calculation benchmark that utilizes square roots instead of prime numbers. The 32 million number benchmark is used.

The AIDA64 suite has various benchmarks for CPU, FPU and memory testing: CPU Queen is an integer benchmark that tests branch prediction and misprediction penalties. CPU PhotoWorxx tests the SIMD integer arithmetic execution units of the CPU and the memory subsystem. CPU ZLib is a compression benchmark that tests the combined CPU and memory performance. CPU AES is a multi-core encryption benchmark that uses Advanced Encryption Standard data encryption. CPU Hash is an integer benchmark that measures performance using SHA1 hashing algorithm. FPUJulia measures single precision FP, FPU Mandel measures double precision FP, FPUSinJulia measures extended precision FP while FPUVP8 is a video compression test utilizing the FPUJulia fractal module.

PCMark 8 simulates typical home-related workloads including web browsing, gaming, photo editing, video chat and productivity. Like Futuremark’s 3DMark, a numerical score is generated from the combination of semi-synthetic tests.

Compression and Multimedia Benchmarks

WinRAR is a very popular compression program and has a built-in multi-threaded benchmark.

MAXON’s Cinebench R15 runs two sets of benchmarks, a processor test for the CPU and an OpenGL test for the graphics cards. The 3D rendering workload is based on Maxon’s Cinema 4D, a program utilized by movie production studios world wide for special effects so it is a semi-synthetic test closer to real-world 3D graphics benchmarking.

x264 is a popular free software library for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. x264 FHD measures how efficient a system is in encoding H.264 video and produces results in frames-per-second.

Handbrake is free open-source video transcoder that can convert various video file formats to compatible video files for other typical media viewing applications such as in an iPhone or Android tablet. A 52:55 1.1GB H.264 MKV file was used converted to the built-in iPod Preset (5G Support), then manually timed. The results are in seconds and the lower number is the better result.