ASUS P8Z77-V Premium Review: A Bentley Among Motherboards

3D Movement Algorithm Test

The algorithms in 3DPM employ both uniform random number generation or normal distribution random number generation, and vary in various amounts of trigonometric operations, conditional statements, generation and rejection, fused operations, etc.  The benchmark runs through six algorithms for a specified number of particles and steps, and calculates the speed of each algorithm, then sums them all for a final score.  This is an example of a real world situation that a computational scientist may find themselves in, rather than a pure synthetic benchmark.  The benchmark is also parallel between particles simulated, and we test the single thread performance as well as the multi-threaded performance.

Despite all the Z77 motherboards being at the same CPU speed in our 3DPM single threaded test, the ASUS P8Z77-V Premium comes out on top with our two other ASUS motherboards.

The ASUS P8Z77-V Premium benefits from MultiCore Enhancement in multithreaded testing, which allows the processor to remain at the top turbo bin (39x multiplier) during any load.  This gives the Premium (and other ASUS/Gigabyte boards) an advantage in this testing.

WinRAR x64 3.93 - link

With 64-bit WinRAR, we compress the set of files used in the USB speed tests. WinRAR x64 3.93 attempts to use multithreading when possible, and provides as a good test for when a system has variable threaded load.  If a system has multiple speeds to invoke at different loading, the switching between those speeds will determine how well the system will do.

The MultiCore Enhancement of the Premium gives us the joint top Z77 score in our WinRAR test.  However, the extra cores and MCE of the ASUS X79 Rampage boards still come out ahead.

FastStone Image Viewer 4.2 - link

FastStone Image Viewer is a free piece of software I have been using for quite a few years now.  It allows quick viewing of flat images, as well as resizing, changing color depth, adding simple text or simple filters.  It also has a bulk image conversion tool, which we use here.  The software currently operates only in single-thread mode, which should change in later versions of the software.  For this test, we convert a series of 170 files, of various resolutions, dimensions and types (of a total size of 163MB), all to the .gif format of 640x480 dimensions.

In line with our 3DPM testing, it seems like the ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe and Premium both have a default algorithm that maintains higher multipliers during single threaded testing.  As a result, we have a new top time in our FastStone testing with the Premium at 47 seconds.

Xilisoft Video Converter

With XVC, users can convert any type of normal video to any compatible format for smartphones, tablets and other devices.  By default, it uses all available threads on the system, and in the presence of appropriate graphics cards, can utilize CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs as well as AMD APP for AMD GPUs.  For this test, we use a set of 32 HD videos, each lasting 30 seconds, and convert them from 1080p to an iPod H.264 video format using just the CPU.  The time taken to convert these videos gives us our result.

As XVC loves cores and MHz, the Premium and other MultiCore Enhancement boards do very well compared to other Z77 motherboards.  X79 still reigns supreme by having more cores and higher memory bandwidth.

x264 HD Benchmark

The x264 HD Benchmark uses a common HD encoding tool to process an HD MPEG2 source at 1280x720 at 3963 Kbps.  This test represents a standardized result which can be compared across other reviews, and is dependant on both CPU power and memory speed.  The benchmark performs a 2-pass encode, and the results shown are the average of each pass performed four times.

The Premium also comes top or near top in our x264 testing.