Testing methodology
Comparison Motherboard Configurations |
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ASRock Z97 Anniversary |
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| Scan Buy It Now | TBC (£60 estimated) |
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| BIOS | 1.11 |
3004 |
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| Chipset Revision | Intel Z97 |
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| CPU 1 | Intel Pentium AE G3258 (HD Graphics) |
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| CPU 2 | Intel Core i3-4330 (HD 4600) |
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| Memory | Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB DDR3 (2 x 8GB) |
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| Memory Timings | 9-10-9-27-2T @ 1,866MHz |
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| System Drive | Crucial M500 (240GB) |
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| Chassis | Corsair Graphite 600T |
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| Power Supply | Corsair AX760i |
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| Operating System | Windows 8.1 (64-bit) |
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CPU and Memory Benchmarks |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| BioShock Infinite | 1,280x720, medium quality | ||||
| GRID 2 | 1,280x720, high quality | ||||
| Total War: Rome II | 1,280x720, medium quality | ||||
Miscellaneous Benchmarks |
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| 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.