Testing Procedures
We will be running the ASRock Z68 Extreme4 through a full battery of benchmarks. Once again here are the specifications of our entire testing system.
Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K
Motherboard: Zotac Z68-ITX WiFi Supreme
Memory: 4GB DDR3-1066
Storage: Samsung 750GB SATA Drive
Optical: ASUS Blu-ray Drive
Power: OCZ ZX-Series 850W
Cooling: Thermaltake FRIO
Opening up CPU you can see the specs on our system.
Here are the benchmarks we will be running.
SiSoftware Sandra (download)
– Overall System Benchmark
– Processor Arithmetic
– Processor Multimedia
– Physical Disks
AIDA64 (download)
– Cache & Memory Benchmark
PCMark 7 (download)
PCMark Vantage (download)
3DMark Vantage (download)
Geekbench (download)
Before we get into testing let’s run the Windows 7 Experience Index. The Windows 7 Experience index rates your systems components on a scale from 1.0 to 7.9. Our system scored a 5.9 which is pretty good.
Once I had the system setup I installed Boxee and a few other programs. I connected the system to my 42-inch LCD via HDMI and used it as a media center for about a week. I used Boxee mainly, but also I streamed Netflix. I played 720p and 1080p movies without any issues. When playing 1080p movies the CPU usage was about 25-30%.
Another thing I tested was gaming on the integrated Geforce GT 430. Usually with a graphics card like this I test the Source Engine using Counter-Strike: Source. I first tried running the built-in stress test but each time I ran it, it would crash the system, even at lower resolutions. So I just played the game for a few hours and everything seemed to be fine. I’m not sure why the stress did not work but every source game I played worked perfectly fine.
