CPU Performance Results

We spent a about a week with the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX and IvyBridge before beginning our performance testing, running various configurations and CPUs, and checking hardware compatibility. We verified our power consumption numbers using various different power supplies, and played a few hours of games with some members of the TPU community to get an overall feel for the board and to verify stability. Once completed, we tore down the system, mounted our Noctua cooler and put the board through the paces.

SuperPi

SuperPI serves as our memory-focused benchmark, being highly single-threaded. The ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX is right near the top, but looking at the actual clocks, it's easy to understand why it that wee bit slower.

wPrime

wPrime is much more CPU-focused, but memory plays its role as well. The ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX is just a bit behind the Gigabyte board, but again, it's got slightly lower clocks..

WinRAR

Part of our motherboard benchmarking suite is the built-in benchmark that is part of the WinRAR software suite. In this test, the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX ended up as expected, right with the Z68 products with a 300 MHz boost to all cores.

AIDA64

We employed AIDA64's memory bench to highlight memory bandwidth. We isolate the write performance metric as it serves as a good indicator of overall memory performance. The ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX did well here, just a bit behind the Gigabyte board, again, due to the slightly lowered clocks. I could have manually adjusted things to make them even, but instead, what you see is what you get out of the box.

HandBrake Encoding

Handbrake is used for encoding testing, and provided results much similar to the previous benchmarks, with the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX just behind the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H WiFi.

CineBench Encoding

In Cinebench, the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX was a bit slower than some of the other tested SKT 1155 products on the GPU side, but the CPU portion again showed the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX just a bit behind the Gigabyte Z77-UD5H WiFi, although by a slightly larger margin than the previous tests.