ASRock Z77 Extreme6 Motherboard

Benchmarking

Test System:

• CPU: Intel Core i5-2300
• Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Extreme6
• RAM: Super Talent Extreme Performance DDR3 RAM 9-9-9-28@1866MT/sec
• Video card: Sapphire HD 6970 2GB GDDR5 Dual Fan
• System drive: Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB
• Data drive: Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB
• Power supply: Corsair HX750W
• Chassis: Silverstone Fortress FT-02
• OS: Windows 7 Ultimate Service Pack 1
• Graphics Drivers: Catalyst 12.4

Aida64

CPU Queen – speed chess for your CPU

This test is all about the CPU, testing branch prediction ability and misprediction penalties. All things being equal, the shorter pipeline usually wins here. As you might expect, our test system did reasonably well in this test, though it was ultimately beat out by CPUs with more cores, real or virtual, to devote to the task.

CPU PhotoWorxx – brute force image manipulation, as fast as your CPU and RAM can deliver

This benchmark is extremely bound by simultaneous memory transactions, so systems with triple-channel or quad-channel memory configurations will almost always do better, all other things being equal. Here our test system did quite well, coming in just two spots from the top.

CPU ZLib – basic data squeezing, nothing fancy

This benchmark tests both the CPU and RAM by the simple expedient of running data through the ZLib compression library. This test doesn’t use anything past the basic x86 instruction set, so it’s a measure of pure brute-force number crunching capability. Here things lagged behind a bit, again due to the lack of more cores to throw at the problem.

CPU AES – encryption

AES encryption is used in many places you’d expect, such as SSL/TLS connections, and the TrueCrypt, BitLocker, and FileVault disk encryption systems. It’s also used in some less obvious places, like in the 7Zip, RAR and WinZip compression tools. Here’s where the Z77 chipset starts to show its worth; our test system outperformed a higher clocked and hyperthreaded i7-2600.

CPU Hash – data digests

SHA1 is the popular complement to AES. Where encryption provides privacy for your data, hashing provides tamper-resistance, in the form of a fingerprint that will change if even one byte of the original data changes. Unlike with AES, the Sandy Bridge CPUs don’t have special hardware acceleration for SHA1. As you might expect, more cores equals faster hashing.

FPU VP8 – video on the go

Video encoding is one of the few things that a lot of people do that really pushes modern CPUs. This test forgoes H.264, which often has lots of special hardware acceleration, in favor of VP8. If you want an example of VP8 in action, go watch any YouTube video. For VP8 encoding, as with many things, the more cores the better.

FPU Julia	FPU Mandel	FPU SinJulia

The FPU Julia, FPU Mandel, and FPU SinJulia benchmarks are all variations on a single theme: use fractals to test the raw floating-point capacity of your CPU. These tests measure performance in single-precision (32-bit), double precision (64-bit), and extended precision (80-bit) calculations. What’s the moral of this story? If you want to render fractals fast, get more cores.

Cache & Memory

As you can see here, the Z77 chipset is not bottlenecking the memory at all. Memory read speeds, at 18,460MB/sec, are right on par with the memory clock of 1800 MT/sec, and memory copy is actually a bit faster at 19,459 MB/sec. Memory write lags a bit behind clock, at 16,263MB/sec, but this is neither unusual nor unexpected. The latency, at 46.5 ns, is excellent for RAM at this clock speed.

Performance Test

CPU Mark – P67	CPU Mark – Z77

Here the results are entirely CPU-dependent; the motherboard’s only task is to get out of the way. It does so here with aplomb, posting results nearly identical to what we saw with the MSI P67A-GD80. If anything, the results are marginally better with the Z77 chipset.

Memory Mark – P67	Memory Mark – Z77

Same story here; incremental improvements over the P67.

Disk Mark – P67	Disk Mark – Z77

Here again, minor improvements over the P67. While these tests clearly illustrate that most of the onus is on the CPU itself to perform, it’s good to see that the Z77 board won’t hold you back any if you decide to get one now and grab a 3rd gen Core i5/i7 CPU later on.

Sandra

CPU Arithmetic	CPU Multimedia	CPU Cryptography

Here the results are mostly what you’d expect for a mid-range i5 processor. The one outlier here is the cryptography test, where our test system managed a throughput of 7.8 GB/sec. Given that the same CPU on a P67 board only managed 5.6 GB/sec on the same test, it’s clear that the Z77 is helping out here.

PCMark 7

The basic score of 4562 doesn’t tell us much, but thankfully PCMark 7 gives us a bit more detail to provide context. In the on-the-fly encoding and playback test, our system managed a steady 23fps, which is right on the money for most TV and movie content. In the encode and downscale test, it managed a throughput of 4242 kB/sec, which is enough to manage multiple HD streams—provided, of course, that your storage can keep up with the demand.

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