ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3 Review

1. Introduction2. ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen33. ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3 (Super High Res Gallery)4. ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3 (Bios & Overclocking)5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra7. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit8. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark9. Synthetic: PCMark 710. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage11. Synthetic: 3DMark 1112. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.013. Real World: BluRay Playback Performance14. Real World: MKV Playback15. Real World: Flash HD Performance16. Real World: Media Encoding17. Data Throughput: SSD Performance18. Gaming: Just Cause 219. Gaming: Dead Island20. Gaming: F1 201121. Gaming: Alien V Predator22. Gaming: Lost Planet 223. Closing Thoughts24. View All Pages

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)

• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)

• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)

• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor

• MC – Multi-Core

• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading

• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions

• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics

• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access

• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86

• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

The overclocked Core i7 2600k is a very impressive performer and it is clear there are significant benefits when moving up from the Core i5 2500k at the same clock speed (4.6ghz).

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