ASUS Z97-DELUXE (NFC & WLC) Review: With Two Thunderbolt 2 Too
by Ian Cutress on May 16, 2014 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Asus
- NFC
- 802.11ac
- Thunderbolt 2
- Z97
- Wireless Charging
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.
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Tchamber - Monday, May 19, 2014 - link
Asus have come a long way since my last Asus board... for my old Pentium 4 CPU. This looks good, I want to upgrade when SATA Express becomes mainstream. I should think all us Star Wars fans would love this board/chipset!prophet001 - Monday, May 19, 2014 - link
Did you try booting the XP941 with this motherboard? Would love to see a Windows installation boot on it and get some benchmarks out.RamCity - Monday, May 19, 2014 - link
We just got some feedback from a customer this morning who has installed the XP941 in the ASUS Z97-Deluxe. These are the results with the latest bios dated 16th May (0901)1. With UEFI mode enabled, it's possible to begin a Windows 8 installation from DVD, but on the first reboot, the XP941 drive is not recognised, so the install couldn't proceed.
2. Customer was able to use the XP941 as storage once Windows 8 was installed to a different drive, but it doesn't show up in the list of bootable devices in the bios. He hasn't yet benchmarked the drive to see what sort of transfer speeds he can get out of it.
3. With the previous version bios, he couldn't even begin the windows installation, so it seems ASUS are working on this. Feedback we have from ASUS HQ in Europe is that they are working on getting the XP941 to boot in legacy mode.
4. The customer actually bought an ASRock Z97 Extreme6 as well and had no issues booting and installing Windows on the XP941 (installed in the M.2 socket), and confirmed it operated at full 1200/950MB/s transfer speeds.
My feeling is that it's only a matter of time before ASUS has a bios update which will allow the XP941 to have the OS installed and be bootable, but at this point it's not possible (at least from one customers point of view, and he seemed very technically astute)
Rod (vendor rep for ramcity.com.au)
prophet001 - Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - link
Thank you for the reply. Sounds exciting. Surely the floodgates are about to be opened on this technology.Timur Born - Tuesday, June 10, 2014 - link
How does audio sound once connected to speaker with 3-prong (earth line) speaker system? Like the ones that really would benefit from the audio specs written on paper, not the cheapish 2-prong desktop speaker systems.It's troubling how hard it is to find a modern mainboard that does not amplify all kinds of electronic noise (voltage) over its ground lines (anything made of metal metal), which affects both internal and external audio (PCIe, USB, FW). This is not really a ground-loop issue, but one of noisy ground lines on motherboards (while the PSU and interestingly SATA port ground remains rather clean/unamplified).