MSI Z170A Gaming M9 ACK Motherboard Review: Sharp Dressed, Feature Packed

Name: MSI Z170A Gaming M9 ACK Motherboard
Brand: MSI

by Shawn Sanders — Tuesday, October 04, 2016, 12:06 PM EDT

Z170A Gaming M9 ACK LAME MT And SunSpider

Page 6: Z170A Gaming M9 ACK LAME MT And SunSpider

In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME is an open-source MP3 audio encoder that is used widely in a multitude of third party applications.

LAME MT

Encoding MP3s

In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file (a very long Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application, in both single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.

Here, MSI concedes a second or two loss to Gigabyte and Asus in the OC test. Interestingly, the MSI board put up slightly faster times at stock speeds than the burly ASUS offering.

SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark

JavsScript Performance Testing

Next up, we have some numbers from the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. According to the SunSpider website:

This benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other. Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is:

Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered.

Balanced - This test is balanced between different areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math, all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular browsers.

Statistically Sound - One of the challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval). In addition, in comparison mode it tells you if you have enough data to determine if the difference is statistically significant.

The system was tested using the latest version of the new Microsoft Edge browser, which comes with Windows 10.

Here we see MSI take a win while overclocked and virtually tie with Asus in the stock test. However, again, the margin is less than a millisecond, is within the margin of error in this test, and will frankly go completely unnoticed to the user.