Performance
Then it came time to test out the performance of the Z87I Gaming AC and GTX 760 Gaming ITX I wasn’t really sure the best way to approach testing them together. Doing all of our motherboard and video card testing would just be overloading. What I decided to do was run the combination together through the same benchmarks that I ran our LunchBox 3 build to show how they perform together and then run the video card itself through our standard benchmarks to best compare it to the competition from Asus.
So to start things off, here are the results from the 3DMark Fire Strike, PCMark 8, Passmark, heaven benchmark 4.0, and wPrime benchmarks. To see how they compared to the Lunchbox build that was using the same model CPU and RAM and a similar SSD view the results HERE. As for the results, once again I was very impressed with what a small form factor system can do when companies like MSI give us the high end parts we need. All of my benchmarks came in extremely close to the Lunchbox 3 build, proving that the MSI board and video card would be just as good of a combo to run in your Mini-ITX LAN rig.
Moving on to the performance of the GTX 760 Gaming ITX I want to talk a little more about a few specific benchmarks and then I will just include the rest of the performance benchmarks below. You see, the performance between the GTX 760 and the GTX 670 is marginal at best. Because of that I wanted to take a look at the cooling performance and power usage of both cards to see how they compare. Not only that, cooling and power usage are very important when it comes to LAN rigs.
Starting with power usage, you can see that both the GTX 760 Gaming ITX and the GTX 670 DirectCU Mini use a similar amount of power at idle. When put under load the numbers are close as well, but the MSI card does perform better with 8 watts less usage. For those of you trying to figure out what power supply to use in your SFF build its important to remember when looking at these numbers that the testing was done on a larger 6 core monster of a PC. My experience with these cards using i7-4770’s has been that a 450 watt PSU is actually more than enough with a buffer. That means you can run the small Silverstone power supply if you would like to save space.
Noise performance was once again very close. The MSI card is actually noisier at idle but a few decibels less when put at 100% fan speed. Typically I would say that 100% fan speed never gets used, but in a small form factor build cards can sometimes reach those temperatures so it can be important.
The last cooling benchmark of course would be the temperatures under load benchmark. I reached these numbers on an open air test bench using the Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0 to heat the card up. With similar cooling designs I was expecting similar numbers and for the most part that was correct. The MSI card settled at 80 degrees under load while the Asus card performed slightly better with 77 degrees under the same load. Both cards are warmer than the average aftermarket card, but if you keep in mind the small size that they had to fit in the cooling they both did very well. In fact they both still outperformed their respective reference cards with less space, although the MSI was cutting it close with one degree.
How does the GTX 760 Gaming ITX compare to the GTX 670 DirectCU Mini for performance? Well I think the best way to compare the two would be to look at the latest 3DMark Fire Strike results. As you can see below the GTX 670 does pull slightly ahead in the standard Fire Strike benchmark due to its higher CUDA core count (1152 vs 1344) but overall the numbers are actually very close. In the Extreme benchmark the additional base clock speed that the GTX 760 provides helped the Gaming ITX pull ahead. I think in the end, you aren’t going to see a big difference in gameplay so the price point will play a big role, but I will get into that more in the overall section.
Here are the rest of the benchmarks, sorry for the graph overload.
Synthetic Benchmarks
In Game Benchmarks