Performance
To start off our performance testing I ran the Z170X Gaming 7 through our base benchmark suite. THE results between boards aren’t that important, the key is making sure that the Gaming 7 doesn’t have any weird issues. So to test that I hooked up our GTX780 and hit a nice variety of tests. None of the results showed any issues. There was a bit of a performance premium on the Gigabyte but that could be related to us having to test with a Mushkin DDR4 kit because we ran into issues with our Kingston HyperX kit. After speaking with Gigabyte and Kingston it sounds like they are hard at work getting the compatibility issues worked out. Gigabyte has already released one BIOS update working on the issues but I would expect to see more in the near future until they have it worked out.
3DMark | |||
Motherboard | Overall Score | Graphics Score | Physics Score |
MSI Z170A Gaming M5 | 8653 | 9635 | 12451 |
Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 | 8849 | 9783 | 13622 |
PCMark 8 Home Accelerated Score | |||
MSI Z170A Gaming M5 | 4712 | ||
Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 | 4798 | ||
Passmark Overall Score | |||
MSI Z170A Gaming M5 | 5507.6 | ||
Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 | 5669.8 | ||
Bioshock Infinite Average FPS | |||
MSI Z170A Gaming M5 | 108.28 | ||
Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 | 108.96 | ||
Tomb Raider Average FPS | |||
MSI Z170A Gaming M5 | 57.8 | ||
Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 | 57.9 | ||
Hitman: Absolution Average FPS | |||
MSI Z170A Gaming M5 | 46.8 | ||
Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 | 46.3 | ||
Sleeping Dogs Average FPS | |||
MSI Z170A Gaming M5 | 60.3 | ||
Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 | 61.1 |