GIGABYTE Z97X-Gaming G1 WiFi-BK Intel Z97 Motherboard Review

SiSoftware Sandra Memory Bandwidth & Cinebench R15

The Sisoftware Sandra 2012 SP3 benchmark utility just came out a few weeks ago and we have started to include it in our benchmarking. Sandra 2012 comes with support for Virtualisation (Virtual PC/Server, Hyper-V, VMware) and GPGPU (OpenCL, DirectX 11 DirectCompute), but today we will be using the program to look at memory and CPU performance!

Benchmark Results: The GIGABYTE Z97X-Gaming G1 WiFi-BK falls right where it should in the SiSoftware Sandra Memory bandwidth benchmark with an aggregate performance of 28.04GB/s. This puts the GIGABYTE Z97X-Gaming G1 WiFi-BK right with the bulk of the other boards, just a hair over 28GB/s.

Cinebench R15

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Iron Man 3, Oblivion, Life of Pi or Prometheus and many more.

Benchmark Results: The GIGABYTE Z97X-Gaming G1 WiFi-BK trailed most of the boards with a score of 799, though we’re only talking about a difference of 5 points out of ~800 or roughly .6% when running the benchmark on all of the available CPU threads. When I ran the single thread benchmark, the GIGABYTE Z97X-Gaming G1 WiFi-BK took the top spot with a score of 159 points, not exactly blowing the competition out of the water, but it’s enough to take the lead.