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
Gaming Benchmarks
F1 2013
First up is F1 2013 by Codemasters. I am a big Formula 1 fan in my spare time, and nothing makes me happier than carving up the field in a Caterham, waving to the Red Bulls as I drive by (because I play on easy and take shortcuts). F1 2013 uses the EGO Engine, and like other Codemasters games ends up being very playable on old hardware quite easily. In order to beef up the benchmark a bit, we devised the following scenario for the benchmark mode: one lap of Spa-Francorchamps in the heavy wet, the benchmark follows Jenson Button in the McLaren who starts on the grid in 22nd place, with the field made up of 11 Williams cars, 5 Marussia and 5 Caterham in that order. This puts emphasis on the CPU to handle the AI in the wet, and allows for a good amount of overtaking during the automated benchmark. We test at 1920x1080 on Ultra graphical settings.
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Bioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite was Zero Punctuation’s Game of the Year for 2013, uses the Unreal Engine 3, and is designed to scale with both cores and graphical prowess. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
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Tomb Raider
The next benchmark in our test is Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider is an AMD optimized game, lauded for its use of TressFX creating dynamic hair to increase the immersion in game. Tomb Raider uses a modified version of the Crystal Engine, and enjoys raw horsepower. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
| Tomb Raider, 1080p Max | ||
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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).