MSI Z170A Gaming M7 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.

Call of Duty 4 is a very fast paced first person shooter based on modern warfare tactics and weapons.  The game is based on DirectX 9 technology and really shows that game developers can make incredible looking games using older technology.  For this benchmark we are using a custom timedemo that was recorded during an actual online multiplayer game.  The demo is then replayed as a benchmark in the game with the average FPS recorded at the end.

Bapco SYSmark 2012 is a true real-world benchmarking suite and upgrade to SYSmark 2007 Preview.  The new benchmark brings true 64-bit application testing along with full support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.  SYSmark tests the whole system performance by running through a series of real programs while recording the results.  These programs include: ABBYY FineReader pro 10.0, Adobe Acrobat Pro 9, Adobe After Effects CS5, Adobe Dreamweaver CS5, Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, Adobe Flash player 10.1, AutoDesk 3DS Max 2011, AutoDesk AutoCAD 2011, Google Sketchup Pro 8, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft Office 2010, Mozilla Firefox Installer, Mozilla Firefox 3.6.8, Winzip Pro 14.5.

PCMark 7 is a overall system benchmark designed for Windows 7 that combines more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. The PCMark score is completely portable however to recreate it the score completely you will need almost identical hardware.

PCMark 8 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. There are six individual testing scenarios 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.  Our results are pretty straight forward and show some good numbers across the board.  Normally performance differences can be attributed to UEFI tuning and memory compatibility.
 
It should be noted that directX 11 is not represented in our motherboard reviews because the results are almost purely based on the video card and has 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.  Again, just like with the synthetic tests both motherboards perform identically except for the two real-world games where the MSI fell behind.

Sadly PCMark Vantage had to be dropped and I am working on a replacement for the XVID encoding benchmark in hopes of showing something with multithreaded optimizations.