Review-Z68 Chipset (ASUS P8Z68-V Pro): The Best Match for Your Sandy Bridge!

Test Platform

The hardware components used in our benchmark are as follows:

• Processor: Intel Core i7 2600K
• Motherboard: ASUS P8Z68-V Pro
• Memory: Kingston KHX1600c9D3B1K2/4GX
• Storage: Western Digital 500 GB Black, Kingston SSDNow V+100 64 GB and Kingston SSDNow VSeries 30 GB, Intel X25-V 40 GB
• Power Supply: Coolermaster Silent Pro Gold 800 Watt
• Heatsink: Coolermaster Hyper 212+
• Monitor: Philips 221E
• Input Devices: Genius (keyboard and mouse)
• OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
• Drivers: Intel Chipset 9.2.0.1.1025 and Intel Graphic 15.21.10.2291

Test Results

To get an idea of how much SSD Caching is affected by the speed of the corresponding SSD, we used a number of different solid state drives from various price points in our test.

SYSMark 2007

SSD caching yields between 5-10% performance improvements compared to conventional, HDD-only mode, depending on the type of SSD being used. The 10% increase can be obtained by speeding up the processor. In this test, the processor was configured at standard speed.

PCMARK Vantage

This benchmark benefits greatly from an SSD. However, SSD caching does not deliver significant performance improvement. Looks like that feature is not always helpful in every scenario.

3DMark Vantage

The overclocked, 4.4 GHz Core i7-2600K yields substantial performance boost of 25%, showing that the Z68 is indeed, a remarkable platform for overclocking.

Left 4 Dead 2: Sacrifice

Z68’s ability to harness both the on-CPU graphics core and overclocking potential on the Sandy Bridge processors comes in handy when you need to improve the processor’s graphics processing power. By overclocking the CPU cores, we managed to obtain a 25% performance improvement in Left 4 Dead, making the game pretty much playable.

MediaEspresso

Thanks to Virtu, we were able to use all available acceleration options in MediaEspresso without having to remove the dedicated graphics card. All with one click of a button.