ASUS Maximus XII Formula Motherboard Review

UT3 is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series.  It has no story mode gameplay and is exclusively designed for multiplayer action.  While the gameplay and weapons are similar to the UT2004 counterpart, the gaming engine is all new.  For this benchmark, we're using the UT3Bench tool from Guru3D, and CarbonFire Botmatch to record framerates.  The resolution was set to 800x600 to minimize any performance gains from the video card.

Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer's hardware capabilities.  Previous versions of this benchmark are used to collect HWBOT points and it has been a common entry into the competitive benchmarking lineup.  This is benchmark is purely CPU based with very little impact related to GPU selection or memory type and one of the best benchmarks for testing multi core processors.

SYSmark 2018 is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of Productivity, Creativity and Responsiveness. The new Productivity Scenario has updated workloads and applications geared towards office centric user activities. The new Creativity Scenario which has updated workloads and applications geared toward media centric user activities and the new Responsiveness Scenario models “pain points” in the user experience when performing common activities.

PCMark 10 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. Similar to 3DMark this new version tests the entire system as a whole using applications that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.  This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

Our real world benchmarks are designed to illustrate a cross section in performance that covers gaming, video encoding, content creation and everyday office applications.  The results are pretty straight forward and show some good numbers across the board and reflect some of what was shown on the Synthetic page.  Normally performance differences can be attributed to UEFI tuning and memory compatibility where even the slightest change can have a big impact on real world applications.
 
It should be noted that DirectX 11/12+ is not represented in our motherboard reviews because the results are almost purely based on the video card selected and very little to do with motherboard performance.  Likewise the benchmarks we have chosen respond well to minor changes in memory bandwidth and how efficient the system configuration is.  

When we test our systems we do so with the default and auto assigned settings in place so to represent un-turned and out of box performance.  (read: default user setups).  Your performance may vary depending on the time you spent tuning your hardware.

There are two benchmarks in my benchmarking suite that I trust over all others to provide good "real world" results.  BAPCo SYSmark 2018 and PCMark 10.  These benchmarks use reall applications to simulate load and record the results.  Each run can be verified and running them more than once will often result in the same score.  As a result it doesn't mater if you have a super fast multi core CPU if it doesn't translate into better overall performance.

Likewise these benchmarks can also help to isolate bottlenecks which can be just about anything in a modern PC.