The Asus Prime Z270-A & GIGABYTE Z270X-Ultra Gaming Motherboard Review
by E. Fylladitakis on July 18, 2017 10:45 AM ESTCPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC (DDR4-2133 C15) for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default. For most of the motherboards in this test, our CPU testing becomes an indicator if any issues exist.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
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. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
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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A5 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
A good comparison review of products that people will actually buy instead of the $500 monstrosities we normally see. Thanks.theuglyman0war - Friday, July 21, 2017 - link
The only reason I invested in flagship enthusiast bait was to bet on the components being built to last and stand up to harsh worst case scenarios.Considering they were built to handle punishment under ln2 extremes.
But they usually went on sale fairly quickly after the initial release. ( the rampage extreme III I am still sitting on I bought for well under $400 in about 3 months after release )
I assume those days are over?
Which is a shame considering the punishing volt experiementation and water accidents I have had...
Hedging my bets on the expensive caps and mosfets have seemingly bought me longevity to wait out this incremental expensive hell!
In the interim on client builds...
I been getting the mil spec bait instead.
A comparison between the mil spec branded stuff between gigabyte and asus would be interesting as well as an honest exploration whether as much is actually of a grade that might guarantee longevity/abuse? Or manufacturer ad nauseam abuse that offers no value compared to server grade branded stuff? ( asus prime ).
Is there a mil spec ansi standard that is legally meaningful?
The relative cheap price compared to the gaming flagship bait seems reasonable.
But I am not even sure about server grade claims? Compared to say...
The expense of Super Micro?
I close my eyes n just buy the cheapest "tuf" branded boards n cross my fingers.
OddFriendship8989 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
I can't comment about these two boards specifically, but I've used the Gaming K7 and Maximus IX Hero, and while I feel Gigabyte tends to be more generous in features, as someone who overclocks, I really need the Adaptive voltage setting that's missing from GIgabyte boards.RiZad - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
"The default boot time of both the Asus Prime Z270-A and the GIGABYTE Z270X-Ultra Gaming is very good, with 12.6 seconds for the former and 13.4 seconds for the latter" something is wrong with the graph for that because thats not at all what is shown. it seems to have the default and stripped reversed. the other 2 points of comparison show default on top, stripped under.jbrl - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Would have really liked to see a comparison to a 170 board with the updated bios. Otherwise, why should I drop a few hundred extra on a new board?A5 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
If you're already on a Z170 board there is no reason to upgrade.jbrl - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Thanks, that is what I was thinking. I guess they can't put that in the review because asus will stop sending them samples.shabby - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Ultra gaming tactical pro sli ftw edition... this is getting a bit absurd.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
While there is certainly a proliferation of longer names, I feel these motherboard names are not excessively long. Sure, they could be shorter, but I feel that it doesn't give off an "Ultra gaming tactical pro sli ftw thor odin lightning edition" vibeBullwinkle J Moose - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Boot Times look Horrible!I wish Intel would streamline their chipset for speed
I remember how a 1st gen ATOM motherboard with IDE/serial and parallel ports and 2GB Max Ram booted several seconds faster than the 2nd Gen ATOM with 4GB Ram due to the chipset features
Faster CPU's require faster chipsets streamlined for speed freaks!
A stock install of Windows XP on a sammy 840 or 850 Pro boots in 3 seconds on a 35 Watt dualcore Sandy Bridge
A stock install of Windows 10 takes alsmost 10 seconds longer to boot on the same system
disregarding the O.S., chipset features and BIOS should advance with the CPU to match the boot speeds of ancient systems
Why is no-one questioning what is actually limiting the boot speeds on newer systems?
I don't think you can "really" fix this with a different brand of motherboard
We can see that some brands do better than others, but I would think that a sammy 960 Pro booting Win 10 on a new 4+Ghz quadcore CPU could (or should) beat an ancient dualcore system at half the clockspeed in boot times
After all, Win 7 was optimized and advertised as booting faster than XP
Win 8 was optimized and advertised as being faster than Win 7
and Windows Spyware Platform 10 was supposed to be faster than Windows 8.1
What gives?
This is DEFINITELY not fake news!