Synthetic Benching Suites

SiSoft Sandra 2012 SP4C

For gaming we used our Seagate 7002.12 series hard disk drives because they have 500GB of storage. We tested 17 games which are imaged on the SSD and also on the HDD and we could find no real difference in frame rates for benchmark testing performance. We also tested Ivy Bridge with 4GB of RAM vs 8GB and the results are charted in the gaming section and in the summary charts section.  Gaming benchmarks are run at 4.8GHz  For all of our testing other than gaming, we used our 240GB Kingston Hyper-X SSD and our Core i7-3770K CPU is overclocked to 4.2GHz

First we run the complete Sandra benchmark suite with the ECS motherboard. Our charts comparing the individual benchmarks are in the performance summary here.

Now the EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard

Now lets look at processor arithmetic for the ECS Z77 motherboard.

And now lets look at processor arithmetic for EVGA.

Here are some of the Sandra highlights comparing the ECS to the EVGA Z77 motherboards

The EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard is slightly ahead of the ECS motherboard in most of these synthetic tests except in the File Systems Aggregate where the FTW motherboard achieves a significantly higher score.  Look for this to show up in the FTW’s superior SSD benchmarking results further on in this evaluation.

PCMark 7

PCMark 7 has replaced PCMark Vantage as it is more specific to Windows 7 and to DX11.  We are testing at the basic settings of the free version. First up is the ECS motherboard:

Next up is the EVGA FTW motherboard

 Less than 100 points separate the two motherboards.  We are well within any margin of benching error.

Before we look at gaming differences, we need to look at more benchmarks including real world applications that many of us use daily, including calculation, file copying, SSD testing, encoding video, multi-tasking, image editing and gaming.