PCMark05
PCMark05 (made by Futuremark) is a full-system benchmark, it tests not only the CPU but also the RAM, hard drive, GPU, GPU RAM, and even has some tests that do a combination all at the same time.
All told it gives you a pretty good idea of your system’s performance, though if you have one very slow or very fast part that will skew the results somewhat. In the case of this test rig the mechanical hard drive puts a pretty serious dent in the score, but given that I’m using the same drive on both motherboards it doesn’t impact the validity of the testing.
Considering the mechanical HDD, 14507 is pretty good. The more expensive enthusiast oriented P67a-UD4-B3 scored a 14536, 0.2% (yes, less than one percent) faster than this Z68X-UD3, well within random variation on this benchmark. That says something for the value of this Z68X-UD3!
MaxxMem
MaxxMem is a memory benchmark, it is primarily influenced by memory speed and timings, and secondarily by cache size and speed. With a modern second generation Core i series CPU the cache runs at full CPU core speed, so overclocking the CPU will give massive gains in this benchmark (as you’ll see later in the overclocking section). It’s also a very good test of how efficient a motherboard is in dealing with memory transactions.
1385.1 at stock CPU clocks is quite good, the P67a-UD4 scored 1392.7, half a percent faster. Again well within standard variation, but also ever so slightly slower again. That makes for two bits of data, which is enough for a pattern to emerge. Of course, good luck noticing half a percent or less of a difference in the real world!
Cinebench 11.5
Cinebench 11.5 is a CPU benchmark, it doesn’t care much about memory speed, it doesn’t care all that much about cache size or speed, it case about getting data into the CPU and calculating it. Hence it is a good test of how efficient a motherboard is at doing just that: Crunching data.
As you can see, this motherboard and CPU combination is far faster than previous generations! This Z68X-UD3 beat the P67a-UD4 by 00.3%! So much for the pattern I mentioned above! Though Cinebench doesn’t vary much from one run to the next, and a third of a percent is still a very small margin. This result does break the pattern of being slightly slower than the P chipset board however.
PCMark Vantage
PCMark Vantage is one of many benchmarks that Futuremark has made over the years (they also made PCMark05, used earlier in this review). 3DMark Vantage is a combination GPU and CPU benchmark, the GPU portion is weighted more heavily than the CPU portion, but when you factor in the fact that everything the GPU does depends on data that first goes through the CPU things come out about even between them. This makes it an excellent test of the ability of a motherboard to get data into the cpu to be crunched and then out of the CPU and into the GPU.
Last but not least, this Z68X-UD3 threw down a very nice P15625 in Vantage, beating the P67a-UD4’s score of 15565 by 00.4%. That makes it a dead split between the two boards, and earns this Z68X-UD3 a spot on my benching station for some extremely cold cooling sometime soon.
That does it for benchmarks at stock clocks, next up is my favorite part, overclocking!
