Five Z97 Express Motherboards, $160 To $220, Reviewed

Results: Productivity

Autodesk 3ds Max could probably fall into the creativity category as well. But some would argue that, because of the way these frames are calculated in the industry, it’s still productivity. Again, setting aside Gigabyte's forced overclock, we see that ASRock and Supermicro achieve solid completion times.

The Z97 Extreme6 bests all competitors (even the overclocked Gigabyte board) in Visual Studio 2010. Completion times for this benchmark are affected by multiple variables, and Gigabyte’s lower memory bandwidth might be the thing that keeps its tuned configuration away from the winner’s circle.