Intel Z77 Motherboard Review with Ivy Bridge - ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI

3D Movement Algorithm Test

The algorithms in 3DPM employ either uniform random number generation or normal distribution random number generation, and vary in various amounts of trigonometric operations, conditional statements, generation and rejection, fused operations, etc.  The benchmark runs through six algorithms for a specified number of particles and steps, and calculates the speed of each algorithm, then sums them all for a final score.  This is an example of a real world situation that a computational scientist may find themselves in, rather than a pure synthetic benchmark.  The benchmark is also parallel between particles simulated, and we test the single thread performance as well as the multi-threaded performance.

In our single threaded test, the improved IPC from Ivy Bridge is clear to see, with every board able to beat the i7-3960X results.

Now we see some real differences to the boards - as the ASUS has MultiCore Enhancement, which boosts the CPU to full turbo mode under multithreaded mode, it has a clear advantage over the other boards in the test.  Surprisingly the Gigabyte board also did the same, despite clear settings in the BIOS to enforce multiplier ratios at core loads.

WinRAR x64 3.93

With 64-bit WinRAR, we compress the set of files used in the USB speed tests. WinRAR x64 3.93 attempts to use multithreading when possible.

Due to the mixed threaded nature of the WinRar test, this is all about how the board reacts to different load levels.  The four core Ivy chips are on par with the six core Sandy-E chips, but the ASRock Z77 seems to lag behind.

FastStone Image Viewer 4.2

FastStone Image Viewer is a free piece of software I have been using for quite a few years now.  It allows quick viewing of flat images, as well as resizing, changing color depth, adding simple text or simple filters.  It also has a bulk image conversion tool, which we use here.  The software currently operates only in single-thread mode, which should change in later versions of the software.  For this test, we convert a series of 170 files, of various resolutions, dimensions and types (of a total size of 163MB), all to the .gif format of 640x480 dimensions.

The single thread speed is key for FastStone, where the IPC for Ivy really gets to play.

Xilisoft Video Converter

With XVC, users can convert any type of normal video to any compatible format for smartphones, tablets and other devices.  By default, it uses all available threads on the system, and in the presence of appropriate graphics cards, can utilize CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs as well as AMD APP for AMD GPUs.  For this test, we use a set of 32 HD videos, each lasting 30 seconds, and convert them from 1080p to an iPod H.264 video format using just the CPU.  The time taken to convert these videos gives us our result.

As one of our new tests, Xilisoft can show how motherboards treat a fully multi-threaded load with optimised coding.  Again, the ASUS and Gigabyte win out here.

x264 HD Benchmark

The x264 HD Benchmark uses a common HD encoding tool to process an HD MPEG2 source at 1280x720 at 3963 Kbps.  This test represents a standardized result which can be compared across other reviews, and is dependant on both CPU power and memory speed.  The benchmark performs a 2-pass encode, and the results shown are the average of each pass performed four times.

Similarly to Xilisoft, the way different boards react to a full multithreaded load are on display.  Score another one for ASUS and Gigabyte.