Asus Z97 Pro (Wi-Fi ac) Socket 1150 Motherboard Review
Test Setup and PCMark 7
Before we began testing the Corsair solid state drive in the test system was formatted, and Windows 8.1 x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared any prefetch and temp data, and ran the tests.
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The PCMark test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance during typical desktop usage. This is the most important test since it returns the official PCMark score for the system.
Storage
- Windows Defender
- Importing pictures
- Gaming
Video Playback and transcoding Graphics
- DirectX 9
Web browsing and decrypting
The Entertainment test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance in entertainment scenarios using mostly application workloads. Individual tests include recording, viewing, streaming and transcoding TV shows and movies, importing, organizing and browsing new music and several gaming related workloads. If the target system is not capable of running DirectX 10 workloads then those tests are skipped. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given an Entertainment test score.
The Creativity test contains a collection of workloads to measure the system performance in typical creativity scenarios. Individual tests include viewing, editing, transcoding and storing photos and videos. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given a Creativity test score.
The Productivity test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance in typical productivity scenarios. Individual workloads include loading web pages and using home office applications. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given a Productivity test score.
For this benchmark, and the rest of them as well, we're comparing the ASUS board to the previous Z97 boards we've tested, and in this first system-wide benchmark the Z97 (Wi-Fi ac) was the second fastest board we've tested. Only the Gigabyte Z97X Gaming G1 scored higher, but the two of them together were the only motherboards that were capable of scoring over 6,090 in the overall PC Mark test, so overall the ASUS board scored very high on this one. Clearly the board's worst performance was its surprisingly low score in productivity, where it scored below all the other boards, scoring right around where we saw our Z77 board finish. In both Creativity and Productivity however it scored extremely well, but its leads are caused by the differences in our test setup.
