At almost the opposite end of the spectrum from the Asus Maximus V Gene (in terms of target market) we find the Asus P8Z77-M Pro motherboard. The P8Z77-M Pro is also a micro ATX board and despite being aimed at the lower end of the consumer market it shares some of the same features that the Gene has. You still get Asus’ Digi+ power controls and FanXpert+ along with Asus’ commitment to solid design and component selection. We have talked about most of these items in Part I of our review. Now we are going to focus on the performance you can expect when you pick up the P8Z77-M Pro along with Intel’s new Ivy Bridge CPU.
Section II - Performance Tests, SyntheticIn this section of testing we cover the synthetics. These are tests that run a scripted sequence of internal APIs or that use another installed application to perform a series of scripted events. They are great in that they can provide reproducible results across various platforms. On the down side, synthetic tests can be fooled with driver tweaks and optimizations. In some cases it is necessary to rename the .exe file to something generic to discover if this is the case. In any event when this is needed (when a test shows a drastic difference in performance over the renamed exe) we will note this and show both results for comparison. PCMark7 -PCMark7 is the latest general performance test from FutureMark. As each generation of this benchmark has evolved and developed we have watched them add more and more realistic tests to this suite. With this generation we find more media tests, (audio and video transcoding) moving of large files, multiple web page rendering, and much more (the even added DX10 gaming). We use the Overall Performance and Common Usage suites in our testing.Well talk about a surprise the Asus P8Z77-M Pro shows up as a little faster in general computing than the Maximus V Gene. This will certainly be good news for people looking to pick this board up, but might be a little upsetting to a few Gene owners out there. This we back to “normal” during our overclocking tests though, but even with that you can see that the M Pro will do what you need for most general computing needs. 3DMark 11 -3DMark 11 is the other Futuremark test that we run on our motherboards. This test simulates the typical tasks that a GPU (and system) would have to perform to provide you with a good gaming experience. It is based on the DX9, DX10 and DX11 engines but can only be installed on Windows Vista or later. The suite of tests covers DX9, DX10, and of course DX11 rendering; it also covers AI computations and physics. That’s right I said Physics the latest version of 3DMark uses a Havok physics engine. This removes the advantage that nVidia had with 3DMark Vantage. Under 3DMark 11 we find that both Asus boards do very well with the M Pro just a little behind the V Gene when using a discrete GPU. When using the IGP things are reversed though. Again this could be not much more than a BIOS tweak for the V Gene, but still it does show that you can expect good graphical performance from the M Pro and possibly good gaming. HyperPi 0.99b -HyperPi is a front end application that allows you to easily run multiple instances of the SuperPi application. SuperPi, for those that are not familiar with it, is an application that measures the time it takes to calculate the number Pi out to as many as 32 million places. This calculation is then checked and run multiple times (up to 24 for a 32M run). This test stresses the CPU, Memory and HDD as data is handed off between the three. If there is a weak link, HyperPi will show it. For our testing we run the 32M test on as many cores (and threads) as the CPU has available. The slowest CPU time is then recorded. For complex computations the M Pro can handle its own and was faster than any of the other P67 or Z67 boards running our I7 2600K (even on the Maximus IV Extreme). It was at the bottom of the grouping for the three Z77 boards that we tested though. The M Pro picked up alittle during our overclocking testing though. Cinebench R11.5 -Cinebench R11.5 is the 11th release of Maxon’s rendering test. This test is based off of the Cinema 4D engine, which is one of the industry standard tools for digital animation. It is a powerful product with many different modules that can be “plugged” into it to increase its effectiveness. With Cinebench you get to see how your computer would do using this application. There are two tests; one tests the CPU’s ability to render an image across multiple cores or threads. The other tests your systems ability to handle OpenGL based rendering. Under Cinebench we see similar results to our HyperPi testing. The P8Z77-M Pro comes in over all of the P67 boards but behind for the Z77 boards. The same thing happened again during our overclocked testing. The M Pro manages to outperform the Maximus V Gene at the same clock speed.We see the opposite for the Z77 boards for the OpenGL rendering tests though.
