Results: Synthetic Benchmarks
I deviated from our normal bare-installation benchmarking to include default manufacturer-supplied software installations in today’s test, looking specifically for the effect of performance and power differences on efficiency. Default should provide the best balance, right?
Asus started off with a modest lead in 3DMark, which was barely large enough to force a retest that proved this advantage consistent.
I was surprised to see Gigabyte fall behind in PCMark’s storage bench. Retests again proved this deficit consistent using AMD’s own AHCI driver on these AHCI-enabled motherboards.
That drop in SATA performance is mainly seen in PCMark’s “Starting Applications” profile. This will have an impact on the system’s overall performance value, since storage makes up 10% of the overall score.
Asus falls a little behind in Sandra’s Encoding/Decoding and Memory Bandwidth test, but this is also the company that usually gets the top DRAM stability scores. Differences this small are a matter of give-and-take.
