Testing (continued):

Performance Test 7.0:

PassMark offers a collection of tests intended to provide an overview of a system's performance, with results provided for all of the key subsystems. Performance Test 7's complete package was executed, and the results are shown for the overall PassMark rating, as well as the rating for each individual component. The units of measure are arbitrary "marks" where more marks are a good thing.

First up we have the overall PassMark Performance Rating. Stock for stock the ASUS P8Z68 beats out the MSI board by 12%.



The CPU Mark results are up next, where once again the ASUS P8Z68 beats out the MSI reference board - by 19% this time at stock speeds. These differences may be a result of the dynamic overclocking of the Sandybridge processors due to the Intel Turboboost feature.



Memory performance is similar for both the ASUS P8Z68 and the MSI board, as should be expected. Both boards had the G.Skill memory set to 1.5v at 1600MHz dual-channel with timings of 8-8-8-24-2T.



Finally, we have disk performance which shows an increase of 73%. This value is too high to ignore but we can explain why the ASUS P8Z68 beat-out the MSI board by so much here. The MSI board, when tested, was set to the performance robbing "IDE mode" in the BIOS for the SATA II OCZ SSD used at the time of the review. When the ASUS board was setup it correctly defaulted to "AHCI" which increased performance substantially over the MSI board.



Overall, Performance Test 7.0 shows the ASUS P8Z68 has performance at the same level as the MSI board or better.