ASUS Zen AiO Pro Z240IC Review: 4K All-In-One With Guts And Glitz

First, we ran SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. The benchmark has four major tests, including CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks.

SiSoft SANDRA
Synthetic Benchmarks

SiSoft SANDRA has a variety of tests that stress specific components or simulate certain tasks. We put the system through the CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Physical Disks tests. SANDRA receives frequent updates, so if you use the benchmark, check to make sure you have the latest version.

sandra cpu

sandra subsystems

The Zen AiO Pro provided solid scores in SANDRA, particularly in the multimedia and memory tests. It didn’t fare as well in the storage test, as you can see but there is good reason for that. You're looking at it's HDD test score in this SANDRA Physical Disk test. We order this graph according to CPU throughput, however, which puts the Zen AiO Pro on top with a strong showing from it's Skylake CPU.

So we decided to fire-up ATTO for quick sanity check on the performance of the Zen AiO Pro's SSD, which is where its Windows 10 operating system resides.

ASUS Zen AIO SSD ATTO Test

Talk about killer bandwidth; the ASUS Zen AiO Pro's PCIe SSD is one of its strongest assets, offering up peak throughput of 1.5GB/sec for sequential writes and 2.2GB/sec for sequential reads in our ATTO test. The drive specifically is a Samsung PM951 512GB variant, so these number certainly correlate. This result would have blown the other AiOs off the map in the SANDRA disk test, so much so that it would have really skewed the graph. It's a true testament to the evolution of storage performance and how much faster these new PCIe gumstick SSDs really are.

Cinebench R11.5 64bit
Content Creation Performance

Based on Maxon Cinema 4D software this test uses a 3D scene and polygon and texture manipulation to assess GPU and CPU performance. We usually opt for the Main Processor Performance (CPU) test, which builds a still scene containing about 2,000 objects, for total polygon count above 300,000. We run the test twice: once with only one processor core enabled, the next time with all CPU cores blazing. Cinebench displays its results in points.
Cinebench opengl

Cinebench multi cpu

The Zen AiO Pro handled Cinebench’s tests well but it didn’t provide the decisive scores we be showing you next in its PCMark tests, which rely more heavily on storage subsystem performance. Still, the system is clearly well-prepared for mainstream and even heavier workloads. In terms of OGL performance, we were suprised that the ASUS systems GeForce GTX 960M didn't offer a bit more punch but perhaps there's some driver optimization that NVIDIA needs to put forth there.

Joshua Gulick

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine.  A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family. 

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