Z77 Motherboard Round-Up: MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, Intel

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective UEFI menus and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory frequency to the maximum officially supported speed for the given platform. The SSDs were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we 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 temp and prefetch data, and ran the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems Intel and AMD - Head To Head

System 1: Core i7-2700K (3.3GHz - Quad-Core) Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe MSI Z77A-GD65 Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H Intel DZ77GA-70K (Z77 Express Chipset) 2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866 (@ 1333MHz) GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS Windows 7 x64

System 2: Intel Core i7-2700K (3.3GHz - Quad-Core) Asus P8Z68-A Pro (Z68 Express Chipset) 2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866 (@ 1333MHz) GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS Windows 7 x64

System 3: Intel Core i7-3820 (3.2GHz - Quad-Core) Asus P9X79 Deluxe (X79 Express Chipset) 4x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866 (@ 1600MHz) GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS Windows 7 x64

System 4: AMD FX-8150 (3.6GHz Eight-Core) Asus CrossHair V Formula (AMD 990FX Chipset) 2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866 (@ 1866MHz) GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS Windows 7 x64

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Futuremark's PCMark 7 is the latest version of the PCMark whole-system benchmarking suite. It has updated application performance measurements targeted for a Windows 7 environment and uses newer metrics to gauge relative performance, versus the older PCMark Vantage.

Below is what Futuremark says is incorporated in the base PCMark suite and the Entertainment, Creativity, and Productivity suites, the four modules we have benchmark scores for you here.

Futuremark PCMark 7 General Application and Multimedia Performance

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

Image manipulation
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.

All four of the Z77 Express-based motherboards we tested performed with a fraction of one another and the older Z68 platform. If you want to pick nits, the Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe technically put up the highest PCMark score, but the deltas separating the boards is so small that it falls well within the margin of error for this benchmark.