Intel Z270 Motherboard Round-Up: MSI, Gigabyte, And ASUS Offerings For Kaby Lake
Z270 Motherboard Round-Up: Test Setup and PCMark 8
Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test system for this article, we first updated the BIOS and set the board to its default settings. Once we were sure all settings were at their stock values, we saved them, re-entered the BIOS and ensured the memory speed was set to DDR4-2133 (its maximum, officially supported speed) for stock tests and DDR4-2666 for the overclocked tests, which matches the memory speed used on motherboards we've tested previously.
Our test rig is powered by an Intel Core i5-7600K quad-core processor and 16GB of Corsair Vengeance 2666MHz RAM., a 1250W Thermaltake PSU, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU and a Corsair Neutron XT 240GB SSD.
Once the Windows 10 installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. We then installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared any old prefetch and temp data, and ran the tests. The system was restarted and allowed to hit an idle state when necessary before initiating any tests.
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The Home test includes workloads that reflect common tasks for a typical home user. These workloads have low computational requirements making PCMark 8 Home suitable for testing the performance of low-cost tablets, notebooks and desktops. Home includes workloads for web browsing, writing, gaming, photo editing, and video chat. The results are combined to give a PCMark 8 Home score for your system.
The Creativity test includes workloads typical of enthusiasts and professionals who work with media and entertainment content. With more demanding requirements than the Home benchmark, this benchmark is suitable for mid-range computer systems. PCMark 8 Creative includes web browsing, photo editing, video editing, group video chat, media transcoding, and gaming workloads.
The Work test measures your system's ability to perform basic office work tasks, such as writing documents, browsing websites, creating spreadsheets and using video chat. The Work benchmark is suitable for measuring the performance of typical office PC systems that lack media capabilities. The results from each workload are combined to give an overall PCMark 8 Work score for your system.
Here we see MSI and ASUS once again throwing down for dominance. The MSI XPOWER Titanium pulls away in both the Home and Work workloads. However the more affordable offering from ASUS takes the Creative test. Both the MSI and ASUS board edge-out the Gigabyte board which pulled up the rear by fractions yet again.
