MSI Intel 1155 Z68 PCI Express 3.0 Motherboard Z68A-GD65G3

Benchmarks:

AIDA64

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Memory:

These benchmarks for memory are impressive, largely because this is at stock settings.

CPU:

Utilizing the Intel Turbo boost technology we are pulling 3.2Ghz off of the i5-2400. We are seeing the encryption prowess the Sandy Bridge line is famous for. It comes as no surprise the Z68 chipset utilizes this processor to its full capability.

Raw System Information:

Hands down the best way to get a full look at your system is with AIDA.

Cine Bench:

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

Taking a look at the cine-bench results for the processor i was surprised at how well it performed. I did not expect an i5-2400 to surpass an i7 in performance. This is truely a tribute to intel’s progression. The graphics results are not surprising, the GTX480 continues to be a superb card, surpassed in this benchmark only by ATI’s professional video card.

Passmark:

“PassMark Rating, which is obtained by users after running the full suite of tests available from PerformanceTest. The PassMark Rating is a unique performance rating for a machine’s configuration and is calculated from a machine’s performance over six test suites, comprised of twenty-eight unique tests designed to cover all aspects of computing performance.”

Looking at the breakdown these are impressive scores this sub $200  processor out performs my previous Core i5-750 by over 1300.

PcMark 7 Professional:

The PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

Made by Futuremark this utility is fantastic for testing the performance of a general system. Typically we use the Futuremark utilities to establish graphic performance but I like this one for standard system use. Especially since the performance of the graphics card was not being called into question.

Gaming Benchmarks:

The Performance here was more than I expected from the cpu/gpu combo. I feel strongly that the OCZ REVO x2 played a large part in the increased performance. There is a reason why SSD’s are the enthusiasts choice. But if you take a look at some of the benchmarks from the REVO, it trumps any traditional SSD on the market currently by a long shot.

I ran the benchmark twice because I couldn’t believe these speeds. Watch out for our full review of this VERY fast drive.