Ok, we have taken a look at the MSI Z68A-GD80 B3 and its design, and features. We uncovered a few things that gave us some concern. Will the board be able to handle being loaded up with cards or other devices? How will the relatively small number of PCIe lanes behave if we give them too much to think about at once? Well we are going to find that out as well as see how far we can push this board and our Core i7 2600k CPU. Let’s pick up where we left off and dive into the BIOS before we move onto the performance numbers.
Section II - Performance Tests, Synthetic -In 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.Here we find that thee Z68 falls sharply behind the P67 in general performance testing. If we assume that the PCMark 7 suite is a good indicator of real world general usage then the Z68 and the MSI Z68A-GD80 could be in trouble in some of our later tests.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. As the i7 2600k’s GPU cannot run DX11 we were not able to test the built in GPU with 3DMark11. We did run it with the HD 5870 V2 from Asus and were able to get some very impressive numbers. 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 our HyperPi testing; we unfortunately find the Z68 back at the bottom with only the built in GPU and only marginally better with the HD5870 V2 installed. Even when overclocked it is still lower than we would have liked. This could come back and bite us during our rendering tests and in any application where you need raw computing power across more than one CPU core. 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. Now here is an interesting sight. The Z68A-GD80 does better without the HD5870 in it for CPU based rendering. For OpenGL,…we let’s just say that if you are rendering in OpenGL you will want a discrete GPU.
