by Rob Williams on July 24, 2014 in Motherboards
“Big things come in small packages” might be cliche, but it applies well to mini-ITX motherboards – especially those like ASUS’ Z97I-PLUS. Featuring 802.11ac wireless, an M.2 slot, a common-sense design, and a fantastic software package, this is one board well worth considering for that next ITX build.
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.

Our Intel Z97 Testing OS (Wallpaper Credit)
Note: ASUS’ Z97I-PLUS was tested with its ‘MultiCore Enhancement’ option left enabled. This means that the CPU was clock-boosted, which will result in improved performance over MSI’s Z97I Gaming AC. Also, because the design of the MSI board prevented me from using the same tall memory sticks I had used for testing the ASUS board with, the specs are dissimilar. The MSI board was tested with 8GB of memory spec’d at DDR3-1866 – a stark contrast to the 16GB of DDR3-2133 we normally use. A difference in hardware like this isn’t ideal, but this particular motherboard forced my hand. None of our tests exhaust 8GB of memory, so the sole difference here will be via the frequency.
|
Intel LGA1150 Test System |
Processor |
Intel Core i7-4770K – Quad-Core, 3.50GHz |
Motherboard |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS (BIOS: ‘2103’ 07/03/2014)
MSI Z97I Gaming AC (BIOS: ‘1.2’ 06/30/2014) |
Memory |
Kingston HyperX Beast 2x8GB – DDR3-2133 11-12-11-31 |
Graphics |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti (GeForce 334.98 Driver) |
Audio |
Onboard |
Storage |
Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD |
Power Supply |
Corsair HX850W |
Chassis |
Corsair Obsidian 700D Full-Tower |
Cooling |
Noctua NH-U14S Air Cooler |
Et cetera |
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit |
Increasing the BCLK value is one way that vendors could sneak in some higher-than-stock performance numbers, so after letting the test bench sit idle for a couple of minutes, we look at the current BCLK value as according to CPU-Z.
BCLK Values |
Result |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
99.8 MHz |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
100.0 MHz |
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).
PCMark 8 Suite Scores |
Home |
Work |
Creative |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
4346 |
5255 |
3478 |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
4214 |
5123 |
3343 |
3DMark (2013) |
3DMark |
Graphics |
Physics |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
3286 |
3464 |
11116 |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
3273 |
3458 |
10604 |
Both boards perform well here, with ASUS getting the slight edge that we expected it would.
I/O Performance
To properly give the internal SATA 6Gbps a good workout, we turn to HD Tune and CrystalDiskMark.
HD Tune Pro 5 |
Minimum |
Average |
Maximum |
Latency |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
309.6 |
422.5 |
460.6 |
0.056ms |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
305.3 |
418.6 |
455.2 |
0.055ms |
CrystalDiskMark |
Read Seq. |
Read 4K |
Write Seq. |
Write 4K |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
523.1 |
41.87 |
317.8 |
161.1 |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
494.5 |
40.83 |
309.8 |
153.4 |
CrystalDiskMark USB 3.0 |
Read Seq. |
Read 4K |
Write Seq. |
Write 4K |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
273.5 |
29.20 |
271.2 |
70.72 |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
270.6 |
28.65 |
262.9 |
67.45 |
I mentioned at the top of the page that with stock clocks, one board should perform like another. One exception to that rule though is I/O; component choices and general board design can make a sizable difference. It’s interesting, then, that despite a boosted CPU clock being unable to improve performance here, ASUS’ board still comes out on top here. The differences are minor, of course, but it’s still interesting to note.
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, music conversion, and 3D rendering.
Adobe Lightroom 5.5 |
Result |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
589 s |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
636 s |
Autodesk 3ds Max 2015 |
Result |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
895 s |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
981 s |
Cinebench R15 |
OpenGL |
CPU |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
132.63 |
800 |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
119.54 |
759 |
dBpoweramp R15 |
FLAC to MP3 |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
829 s |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
874 s |
HandBrake 0.99 |
Result |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
2187 s |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
2319 s |
The free performance boost the ASUS board gives us shines through in these results. It should be noted that even for an inexperienced user, achieving similar boosts on the MSI board would not be difficult. It’s just that ASUS removes the need to pursue that boost (whether or not that’s a good thing is dependent on your perspective).
Sub-system Performance
For memory and CPU testing, we utilize SiSoftware’s Sandra 2014 (SP2).
Sandra 2014 SP2 (Memory) |
Integer |
Float |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
27.472 GB/s |
27.607 GB/s |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
21.604 GB/s * |
21.673 GB/s * |
Sandra 2014 SP2 (Arithmetic) |
Dhrystone |
Whetstone |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
157.16 GIPS |
86.22 GFLOPS |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
148.79 GIPS |
83.01 GFLOPS |
Sandra 2014 SP2 (Multi-core) |
Bandwidth |
Latency |
ASUS Z97I-PLUS |
31.568 GB/s |
36.5 ns |
MSI Z97I Gaming AC |
28.340 GB/s |
36.9 ns |
All looks good, with ASUS once again having a nice little edge thanks to its ‘MultiCore Enhancement’ boost.