Clearly there is significant engineering work taking place to make such functions happen, and if it requires bandwidth it often gives the potential for other manufacturers to steam ahead with more NICs, more USB ports and more SATA ports. The value in such hardware designs is partly reflected in price, but it also has to be vital in the eyes of the user.
Post Your Comment Please log in or sign up to comment. Its power consumption is quiet impressive, and whatever design measures have been used to achieve it do not seem to negatively affect the overall performance. So it would be interesting to complete the picture with the two measurements which are missing.
Privacy Policy. Contact Us. Terms of Use. That speed was only applied to core loads, though. This machine-tuned config was stable under load, with only a hint of throttling under our combined CPU and graphics stress test.
The automated tuner did blue-screen once in its search for the limits of our hardware, but it recovered gracefully. This time, we focused our efforts on the CPU exclusively. We also ignored the base clock and its associated strap. Our K-series Haswell CPU has access to high enough multipliers to cover all but the most extreme overclocking attempts. Higher speeds required more juice, which we were happy to supply with a static voltage.
In the end, we got our K up to 4. That frequency required 1. We were also able to boot the system at 4. Unfortunately, upping the voltage raised temperatures enough to invoke throttling even with our water cooler pumping at full speed. Of course, your mileage may vary. You can read more about Haswell overclocking in this article. Comparative performance testing is a big part of what we do here at TR.
Thanks to increased platform integration, even peripheral performance is largely consistent from one mobo model to the next. There are rare exceptions to this general rule, and the only way to find them is to test motherboards exhaustively. We also threw an Ivy Bridge-based Z77 board into the mix. The highlights of our findings are summarized below. This is the part where I get to say I told you so. Haswell may not be a world-beater on the desktop, but it improves upon its predecessor in numerous ways.
Here, we tested the boards with and without their fast-boot options enabled. You can easily shave a few seconds off your boot time without giving up anything important. There are small gaps between the boards, but no single board comes out looking better than the others overall.
Asus has replicated the problem, which is supposedly unique to our Thermaltake dock. We measured power draw at the wall socket with our test system at idle, playing a p YouTube video, and under a full load combining Cinebench rendering with the Unigine Valley demo.
The ZPRO is one of the most power-efficient mobos of the bunch. The top three boards are pretty close at idle and during YouTube playback. Somewhat surprisingly, our Ivy Bridge system consumes the least wattage under full load.
The gap between it and the ZPRO is larger than the differences between all three Z87 mobos combined. Otherwise, flip to the next page for the full motherboard specs, details on our system configuration, and all of our benchmark data. These double-wide beasts have quiet coolers, beefy metal back plates, and more memory than your average GTX Haswell may support higher memory frequencies, but anything above MHz counts as overclocking. They had no issues operating at that speed.
We should also thank the motherboard makers for providing their products for review. The Corsair drive was also wiped before we loaded our system image.
The tests and methods we employ are usually publicly available and reproducible. All tests were run at least three times, and we reported the median of those results. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them. To test, we encoded a one-minute, p. The source video was obtained from a repository of stock videos on this website. We used the Samsung Earth from Above clip.
We busted out our Inside the second methods to testing gaming performance. Here, we measured the boot time after a full system shutdown. Each board was tested with and without its fast-boot options enabled, and we took full advantage of Win8-specific features when in fast-boot mode.
The biggest takeaway from these results is the fact that Haswell is a little faster than Ivy Bridge overall. Our review of the Core iK tells that story in much more intricate detail. The movie file set contains eight similarly sized files totaling 5. Although the SATA results show relative parity between the Z87 boards overall, note the differences in the performance of the auxiliary storage controllers.
The third-party SATA ports are slower than those connected to the Intel chipset—often by substantial margins. We recommend sticking with the primary ports. However, the standings are shuffled for each and every test. Our multithreaded file copy test is more indicative of the sorts of workloads faced by typical USB storage devices. Our networking results are very close overall. Higher values are better. Our first set of results was gathered with the systems idling apart from the RMAA app, of course.
As far as RMAA is concerned, none of the boards compromise analog signal quality during our load test. The ZPRO is a pretty sweet motherboard. Take the integrated networking, for example. Gigabit Ethernet is handled by an Intel controller, the Those features count for a lot on modern mobos.
Normally when I review a system I keep a list of oddities, issues, irregularities or interesting tidbits of information as I test in order to help shape the review. With the ZPro, my list contained a total of zero entries, indicating that it just worked as it said it should. This is sometimes an oddly rare occurrence in a mature industry.
The brushed metallic look we saw with the ZDeluxe is here on the ZPro as well, as shown on the two power delivery heatsinks and the new styled circular chipset heatsink. The switches and rear IO keep their silvery look. The socket area is bounded on two sides of the minimum Intel specifications by power delivery chokes and on a third side by the DRAM slots.
As with most motherboards in this segment, the heatsinks are designed to allow large coolers, however due to the close proximity of the DRAM slots, users with taller memory might have to rely on slightly smaller CPU coolers in order to fit a full set of memory.
In the socket area the user has access to four fan headers: one to the bottom left below the power delivery heatsink, the two CPU headers between the top heatsink and the DRAM, and a final header just above the pin ATX power connector. At a stretch there is a fifth within reach of the socket, just below the pin, while the sixth and final fan header is at the bottom of the motherboard.
The DRAM slots are color coordinated for the two memory channels, and all four slots use a single sided latch mechanism for easier memory removal. With this system users should be aware that installing memory requires a double check to make sure it is seated in the slot correctly.
Here again the Asus is level pegging with Gigabyte, and Intel's frankly a bit off the pace. That makes the Asus ZPro one of two excellent options, which is the kind of dilemma we're happy to have. Technology and cars. Increasingly the twain shall meet. Which is handy, because Jeremy Twitter is addicted to both. Long-time tech journalist, former editor of iCar magazine and incumbent car guru for T3 magazine, Jeremy reckons in-car technology is about to go thermonuclear.
No, not exploding cars. That would be silly. And dangerous.
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