ASUS Z170 ROG Maximus VIII Extreme Motherboard Review: An Impressive Platform For Skylake


Cinebench R15 and POV-Ray

Cinebench R15 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.

Cinebench R15
3D Rendering
This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

cinebench
Again we see the ASUS Z170 ROG Maximus Extreme VIII performing in line with our top boards, marginally conceding the win to the gaming-oriented Gigabyte board while still proving its mettle.

POV-Ray Performance
Ray Tracing
POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines, and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

pov
Unsurprisingly, our Z170 board results are all within a few points of each other here in the OC tests, with stock settings showing more variance between the competing boards. The ASUS Z170 ROG Maximus Extreme VIII is virtually neck-in-neck with the scrappy Gigabyte Z170-UD5 Ultra Durable.

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