Establishing a Golden Standard? ASUS Z87-EXPERT Motherboard Review

From a performance perspective, we feel that motherboard benchmarking is useless. It’s the motherboard’s job to allow all of the installed hardware to operate at its full potential, so in theory, a $100 option shouldn’t be much (or any) slower than a $300 one. The differences in price instead comes down to the quality of the onboard components and other features.

So why do it at all? It’s because it’s important to make sure that the board we’re dealing with doesn’t lack in one particular area versus the rest. If board A performs 2% slower than board B in PCMark, for example, that’s of no concern to us – random benchmark variance is a fact of life. However, if one board consistently performs weaker than the rest, that’s worthy of note – it could suggest that weaker components have been used which do not allow the hardware to operate at its full potential.

Please bear this in mind when perusing our results. Just because a board under-performs in a single test, it doesn’t mean anything in regards to its quality as a whole. Our ultimate goal here is to make sure that each board we test performs as we’d expect across the gamut of scenarios we pit them against.

Because some motherboards auto-OC the CPU when certain options are chosen (XMP, for example), we force the Turbo ratios for our Core i7-4770K to reference settings: 39x/39x/38x/37x (1/2/3/4 cores).

Let’s get on with it!

The BCLK matchup is as perfectly even as it could get.

General System Performance

To take a look at the “overall” performance of our PC configuration, we rely on dual Futuremark suites: PCMark 8 and 3DMark (2013).

Both boards perform just about evenly in the PCMark and 3DMark tests, as we’d expect, with a slight nod going to ASUS in the gaming test.

I/O Performance

To properly give the internal SATA 6Gbps a good workout, we turn to HD Tune and CrystalDiskMark.

Despite using the same Intel SATA chipset, ASUS’ board managed to give GIGABYTE’s a relative pummeling here. Write 4K speeds are worthy of note in the CDM test, and in each one of the HD Tune results, the ASUS clearly comes out ahead. Somehow, it even managed to shave a chunk off of the random access time.

Both sets of results proved to be so different that I ended up hooking up the GIGABYTE board again to make sure that I actually was using Intel’s port and not Marvell’s. Sure enough, things were fine – it’s just the performance that’s not.

Admittedly, the speeds are still good enough where real-world experiences are not going to be affected, but it’s still a little disconcerting to see the speeds fall so far back. Maybe this is the difference between a $160 and $240 motherboard?

Rendering & Image Manipulation

Writing files to disk or reading a website doesn’t do much to exercise our CPU, so for that, we turn to a few common scenarios – image editing, video rendering and 3D rendering – using a combination of Adobe, CyberLink and Autodesk products.

Interestingly, while GIGABYTE’s board fell quite a bit behind in the synthetic storage tests, its storage limitations held nothing back in these real-world tests. In these gruelling tests, it came ahead.

Sub-system Performance

For memory and CPU testing, we utilize SiSoftware’s Sandra 2013 (SP3a), and for Ethernet testing, we use iperf (or more appropriately, the Java-based jperf which utilizes it).

All checks out here – great results overall.