Review: ASRock Z97 Anniversary Edition

by Tarinder Sandhu on 6 August 2014, 09:30

Tags: AsRock, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qache5

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Testing methodology

Comparison Motherboard Configurations

 
ASRock Z97 Anniversary
Scan Buy It Now
TBC (£60 estimated)
BIOS
1.11
3004
Chipset Revision
Intel Z97
CPU 1
Intel Pentium AE G3258 (HD Graphics)
CPU 2
Intel Core i3-4330 (HD 4600)
Memory
Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB DDR3 (2 x 8GB)
Memory Timings
9-10-9-27-2T @ 1,866MHz
System Drive
Crucial M500 (240GB)
Chassis
Corsair Graphite 600T
Power Supply
Corsair AX760i
Operating System
Windows 8.1 (64-bit)

CPU and Memory Benchmarks

HEXUS PiFast Our number-crunching benchmark stresses a single core by calculating Pi to 10m places
Cinebench R15 Using Cinebench's multi-CPU render, this cross-platform benchmark stresses all cores
wPrime 2.1.0 Another number-crunching benchmark that stresses all available CPU cores/threads

Multimedia Benchmarks

LuxMark 2.0 An OpenCL rendering benchmark
Musemage 1.9.6 An OpenCL image-manipulation benchmark (64-bit)
Handbrake 0.9.9.1 Free-to-use video encoder that stresses all CPU cores (64-bit)

Gaming Benchmarks

BioShock Infinite 1,280x720, medium quality
GRID 2 1,280x720, high quality
Total War: Rome II 1,280x720, medium quality

Miscellaneous Benchmarks

Power Consumption While idling and when running wPrime and GRID 2

Notes

We're comparing the ASRock's performance against a more expensive Asus Z97-A. Examining the performance of both boards at stock speeds should show us how well the Z97 Anniversary does against established competition.

In terms of overclocking, ignoring the auto-settings present at boot-up, using the same procedure adopted when benchmarking the G3258 AE chip in the Asus, we ran the board up to 4.5GHz. However, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, as we used the better Deepcool Lucifer on the Z97 Anniversary. The real point of this review is to see how high we can run a budget system using decent air cooling.

We have also graphed up the performance of a Core i3-4330 (£90) on the Asus, to see how a better CPU fares against a well-overclocked G3258.