GIGABYTE Z97X-UD5H Review: Choose Your Storage Option
by Ian Cutress on May 14, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Gigabyte
- Z97
Real World CPU Benchmarks
Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things – better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal), at the expense of heat and temperature, but also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, memory subtimings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk which is clearly visible, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the purchase.
Rendering – Adobe After Effects CS6: link
Published by Adobe, After Effects is a digital motion graphics, visual effects and compositing software package used in the post-production process of filmmaking and television production. For our benchmark we downloaded a common scene in use on the AE forums for benchmarks and placed it under our own circumstances for a repeatable benchmark. We generate 152 frames of the scene and present the time to do so based purely on CPU calculations.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link
Similarly to WinRAR, the FastStone test us updated for 2014 to the latest version. FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and thus single threaded performance is often the winner.
Video Conversion – Xilisoft Video Converter 7: link
The XVC test I normally do is updated to the full version of the software, and this time a different test as well. Here we take two different videos: a double UHD (3840x4320) clip of 10 minutes and a 640x266 DVD rip of a 2h20 film and convert both to iPod suitable formats. The reasoning here is simple – when frames are small enough to fit into memory, the algorithm has more chance to apply work between threads and process the video quicker. Results shown are in seconds and time taken to encode.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. The principle today is still the same, primarily as an output for H.264 + AAC/MP3 audio within an MKV container. In our test we use the same videos as in the Xilisoft test, and results are given in frames per second.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
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DanNeely - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Good for Gigabyte; they briefly got to the top of my list for the new system I'm planning. Unfortunately when I looked on newegg, it appears that they don't have any boards with 2 USB3 headers which is high on the list of features I want.Bdad - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
Pleaseapertotes - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
"I must commend GIGABYTE in their APP Center redesign, and give kudos to exploring new types of application that they can combine into their package."Ian, EasyTune had a very nasty bug in their previous version in that it had some global, non-customizable hotkeys that took control of some important keys in non-English keyboards, like @, # or |. To make things worse, it also crashed windows 7 x64 when some of those combinations where typed successively by unsuspecting users.
Can you say if this has been fixed?
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
I've asked if GB is aware of the issue. Will let you know when I get an answer.apertotes - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
Oh, they are, they are. I've myself submitted 2 tickets, one in Canada and a second one in Spain because they said they did not have any non-English keyboard to test in their Canada tech support office. Not even a French keyboard. Right.apertotes - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
Well, I just tried, and no, they have not fixed that stupid bug. With Easy Tune active, numbers 1-5 third value is lost, which means no |@#~€. Shame on you, Gigabyte.rpg1966 - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
Consummate? Kinky! I think you meant "commensurate".Ian Cutress - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
Aha, good catch :D Fixed.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
"2 x Ethernet Audio Jacks (ALC1150)"? Cool story!Ian Cutress - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
D'oh! Fixed :)