AIDA64 Benchmark Results

I tested the ASUS Z97-DELUXE LGA1150 motherboard at four different settings: the stock setting, with the TPU switch set to the second position, with auto tuning performed by AI Suite 3, and with the best manual overclock I could achieve. Note that ASUS, like many other motherboard vendors, does play a little trick: at true stock settings, the Intel Core i7-4770K CPU under heavy load will run its cores with the 39x multiplier if one or two cores or loaded, but drop down to lower multipliers as three and four cores come under load. ASUS calls their “trick” ASUS Multicore Enhancement, and what it does is run all four cores at 39x under load. ASUS Multicore Enhancement is enabled by default on this motherboard, so that’s how I ran with the “stock” settings.

AIDA64 Engineer

AIDA64 is a full 64-bit benchmark and test suite utilizing MMX, 3DNow! and SSE instruction set extensions, and will scale up to 32 processor cores. An enhanced 64-bit System Stability Test module is also available to stress the whole system to its limits. For legacy processors all benchmarks and the System Stability Test are available in 32-bit versions as well. Additionally, AIDA64 adds new hardware to its database, including 300 solid-state drives. On top of the usual ATA auto-detect information the new SSD database enables AIDA64 to display flash memory type, controller model, physical dimensions, and data transfer performance data. AIDA64 v1.00 also implements SSD-specific SMART disk health information for Indilinx, Intel, JMicron, Samsung, and SandForce controllers.

All of the benchmarks used in this test- Queen, PhotoWorxx, ZLib, and hash- rely on basic x86 instructions, and consume very little system memory while also being aware of Hyper-Threading, multi-processors, and multi-core processors. Of all the tests in this review, AIDA64 is the one that best isolates the processor’s performance from the rest of the system. While this is useful in that it more directly compares processor performance, readers should remember that virtually no “real world” programs will mirror these results.

We see nice scaling in the Queen test, with a 12% performance increase with Auto Tuning, and a 17% increase with manual tuning. Photoworxx, as we’ve seen previously, responds oddly and unpredictably to CPU speed increases.

The ZLIB and Hash benchmarks both scale nicely. Let’s see how things go with one of my favorite benchmarks, SPECViewPerf…