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

Name: Intel Z77 Chipset
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Sunday, April 08, 2012, 12:01 AM EDT

Cinebench R11.5 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation suite used by 3D animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

Cinebench R11.5

3D Rendering Benchmark

In the single threaded Cinebench test, all of the boards performed within 1/100 of a point of one another, which is about as close as can get. In the multi-threaded test, however, there was a bit larger spread. All of the Z77 Express-based motherboards came in a touch ahead of the Z78 and the Intel DZ77GA-70K--somewhat surprisingly--took the lead overall.

POV-Ray Performance

Ray Tracing Benchmark

POV-Ray , or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

All of the Core i7-2700 powered systems, whether running on the Z68 or Z77 Expressed, performed right on par with each other. There was less than a 1% variation in performance between the Z77 Express based motherboards, which is to say they essentially performed identically.

Tags: Intel, Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Motherboard, Socket 1155, Z77

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com