Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H Black Edition Review – Back in Black!

TECHNOLOGY X TESTING PROTOCOL

At Technology X, we test our motherboard’s slightly different depending upon the product’s marketed purpose, whether it be an entry-level budget motherboard or a high-end enthusiast level motherboard.  Our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however, CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your system performs the way it should.

TECHNOLOGY X TEST BENCH

All of the components we use for testing are standard off-the-shelf PC components from major manufacturers, which can be purchased at a variety local retailers and online. We’ll also provide links to our components for those of you that find an interest in our equipment.

We’d like to thank Gigabyte and Kingston for providing vital components in this test bench, without which this report would not be possible. Check out our review of the Intel Core i5 4690K used in this report and keep a look out for our upcoming review of the XFX R9 290 Double Dissipation

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

When we test various PC hardware, we like to use benchmarks that are readily available for you to download and test for yourself. In our analysis today we will be using FutureMark’s PCMark 8 and Cinebench 15 to test overall system and CPU performance as well as other utilities such as AIDA64 for monitoring and testing overclocks.

OVERCLOCKING 

In our overclocking tests we were able to hit a maximum of 4.6GHz with a Core Voltage of 1.260V, unfortunately we couldn’t get to 4.7GHz as we could not get it to run stable even at 1.285V. This is still quite good as compared to the upper end of what Haswell CPUs can do. We reached a comfortable 81C on the CPU, considering it is volted rather high for Haswell.

CPU BENCHMARKS 

For our CPU Benchmarks, We tested our motherboard at stock and overclocked to 4.6GHz

PCMARK8 – CREATIVE 2.0

As we see here we see a small change as this is about an 8% Increase, this is a synthetic benchmark, so keep that in mind.

CINEBENCH R15

Here we see something, while still synthetic it is a bit more system intensive. We roughly see a 30% boost in performance when overclocked. This is a huge performance boost and will help get workloads done quicker.

STORAGE BENCHMARKS

For testing storage, we did two separate benchmarks, one with AS-SSD and another real-world file transfer between two SSDs using DiskBench to measure the results.

REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER

In this test, we copied a game directory that was over 44GB with 299 files, between two SSDs. The results are displayed in megabytes per second.

Our storage test shows the transfer speed is solid as Gigabyte has been known for solid SATA performance in the past.

AS SSD 

The toughest benchmark available for solid state drives is AS SSD as it relies solely on incompressible data samples when testing performance.  For the most part, AS SSD tests can be considered the ‘worst case scenario’ in obtaining data transfer speeds and many enthusiasts like AS SSD for their needs. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.

Performance is as expected. While not stellar by any means, and the writes are a bit slower than we’d expect these drives perform as they should and most users won’t be able to tell the difference.