GIGABYTE Z97X-UD5H Review: Choose Your Storage Option
by Ian Cutress on May 14, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Gigabyte
- Z97
Scientific and Synthetic Benchmarks
2D to 3D Rendering –Agisoft PhotoScan v1.0: link
Agisoft Photoscan creates 3D models from 2D images, a process which is very computationally expensive. The algorithm is split into four distinct phases, and different phases of the model reconstruction require either fast memory, fast IPC, more cores, or even OpenCL compute devices to hand. Agisoft supplied us with a special version of the software to script the process, where we take 50 images of a stately home and convert it into a medium quality model. This benchmark typically takes around 15-20 minutes on a high end PC on the CPU alone, with GPUs reducing the time.
Console Emulation –Dolphin Benchmark: link
At the start of 2014 I was emailed with a link to a new emulation benchmark based on the Dolphin Emulator. The issue with emulators tends to be two-fold: game licensing and raw CPU power required for the emulation. As a result, many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant post to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53; meaning that anything above this is faster than an actual Wii for processing Wii code, albeit emulated.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
Encryption –TrueCrypt v0.7.1a: link
TrueCrypt is an off the shelf open source encryption tool for files and folders. For our test we run the benchmark mode using a 1GB buffer and take the mean result from AES encryption.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
53 Comments
View All Comments
DanNeely - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Good for Gigabyte; they briefly got to the top of my list for the new system I'm planning. Unfortunately when I looked on newegg, it appears that they don't have any boards with 2 USB3 headers which is high on the list of features I want.Bdad - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
Pleaseapertotes - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
"I must commend GIGABYTE in their APP Center redesign, and give kudos to exploring new types of application that they can combine into their package."Ian, EasyTune had a very nasty bug in their previous version in that it had some global, non-customizable hotkeys that took control of some important keys in non-English keyboards, like @, # or |. To make things worse, it also crashed windows 7 x64 when some of those combinations where typed successively by unsuspecting users.
Can you say if this has been fixed?
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
I've asked if GB is aware of the issue. Will let you know when I get an answer.apertotes - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
Oh, they are, they are. I've myself submitted 2 tickets, one in Canada and a second one in Spain because they said they did not have any non-English keyboard to test in their Canada tech support office. Not even a French keyboard. Right.apertotes - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
Well, I just tried, and no, they have not fixed that stupid bug. With Easy Tune active, numbers 1-5 third value is lost, which means no |@#~€. Shame on you, Gigabyte.rpg1966 - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
Consummate? Kinky! I think you meant "commensurate".Ian Cutress - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
Aha, good catch :D Fixed.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
"2 x Ethernet Audio Jacks (ALC1150)"? Cool story!Ian Cutress - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
D'oh! Fixed :)