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How We Test

Based solely on price, the Asus Strix Z390-E Gaming competes against ASRock’s Z390 Phantom Gaming 9 and Gigabyte’s Z390 Designare. These three boards serve similar but non-identical markets, so we’ll reserve our features discussion for the conclusion.

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Sound	Integrated HD audio
Network	Integrated gigabit networking
Graphics Driver	GeForce 399.24

Comparison Products

Asus ROG Strix Z390-E Gaming

ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 9

Gigabyte Z390 Designare

All three boards have a range of frequency settings that exceeds our hardware capability, a voltage range that exceeds our cooling ability, and small enough increments that we should be able to extract the best moderately-safe overclocks from our CPU and DRAM, so we should expect tight results in our overclocking chart.

Benchmark Settings

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Synthetic Benchmarks & Settings
PCMark 8	Version 2.7.613Home, Creative, Work, Storage, Applications (Adobe & Microsoft)
3DMark 13	Version 4.47.597.0Skydiver, Firestrike, Firestrike Extreme Default Presets
SiSoftware Sandra	Version 2016.03.22.21CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cryptography, Memory Bandwidth
DiskSPD	4K Random Read, 4K Random Write128K Sequential Read, 128K Sequential Write
Cinebench R15	Build RC83328DEMOOpenGL Benchmark
CompuBench	Version 1.5.8Face Detection, Optical Flow, Ocean Surface, Ray Tracing
Application Tests & Settings
LAME MP3	Version 3.98.3Mixed 271MB WAV to mp3: Command: -b 160 --nores (160Kb/s)
HandBrake CLI	Version: 0.9.9Sintel Open Movie Project: 4.19GB 4K mkv to x265 mp4
Blender	Version 2.68aBMW 27 CPU Render Benchmark, BMW 27 GPU Render Benchmark
7-Zip	Version 16.02THG-Workload (7.6GB) to .7z, command line switches "a -t7z -r -m0=LZMA2 -mx=9"
Adobe After Effects CC	Release 2015.3.0, Version 13.8.0.144PCMark-driven routine
Adobe Photoshop CC	Release 2015.5.0, 20160603.r.88 x64PCMark-driven routine (light and heavy)
Adobe InDesign CC	Release 2015.4, Build 11.4.0.90 x64PCMark-driven routine
Adobe Illustrator	Release 2015.3.0, Version 20.0.0 (64-bit)PCMark-driven routine
Game Tests & Settings
*Ashes of the Singularity*	Version 1.31.21360High Preset - 1920 x 1080, Mid Shadow Quality, 1x MSAACrazy Preset - 1920 x 1080, High Shadow Quality, 2x MSAA
*F1 2015*	2015 Season, Abu Dhabi track, RainMedium Preset, no AFUltra High Preset, 16x AF
*Metro: Last Light Redux*	Version 3.00 x64High Quality, 1920 x 1080, High Tesselation, 16x AFVery High Quality, 1920 x 1080, Very High Tesselation, 16x AF
*The Talos Principle*	Version 267252Medium Preset, High Quality, High Tesselation, 4x AFUltra Preset, Very High Quality, Very High Tesselation, 16x AF