ASUS Maximus XI Extreme: Z390 with all the things!

 

Blender

Blender is a great test as it is a good representation of real world productivity with image rendering capability on the CPU or GPU. We test both to show how platform changes can give better performance.

Blender shows the difference between test 1 which is CPU based rendering and 2 which is GPU based. as you can see the CPU bound render the Maximus fell behind both the Gigabyte and MSI. However, GPU performance is slightly better beating out the other competitors.

Cinebench R15

Cinebench is all about rendering out images and doing this on the CPU is hard work, and it offers tests for both single and multi-threaded renders along with even an OpenGL GPU based workload.

Cinebench is probably the go-to as of recent as far as testing CPU performance. and much to my dismay as the benchmark can vary from run to run so this definitely takes more runs to get a  good solid average that is comparable. The single core score shows a small disparity on the Maximus compared to the MSI and Gigabyte but I have to take that with a grain of salt due to the inaccuracies I observed during testing on the MSI and Gigabyte board which allowed them a bit more headroom by omitting the ICCMax constraints.

the multi core result shows the Maximus steadily beating the MSI board with the Gigabyte with higher Ring bus frequency taking the overall win here. However I woudl say all of these boards are once again within a reliastic margin the same as these small measures are much less than most would be able to percieve in everyday usage.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a popular open source video transcoder available free to anyone. We test transcoding a large video file from X264 MKV to MP4

Here we see the Maximus fall in the middle of the pack again running a longer HAndbrake encode which uses AVX. ASUS unfortunately can suffer a bit on AVX loading as they follow proper AVX down binning to ensure that you do not pump way too much power to the CPU and cause any sort of issues where the other boards with MCE seem to not have any sort of ICCMax throttle or AVX offset which if left unchecked will unfairly show them as a higher performer. This coming at the expense of much more power consumption, heat and potentially even a future degraded chip should the AVX power be too much and cause premature failure.

7-Zip

7-Zip is a free open source file compression utility and also a good way to show your PC’s capability to perform compression tasks.

The 7Zip benchmark shows the compression capabilities of the platform and to mu surprise MSI fell a bit behind here. ASUS and Gigabyte much to my surprise scored exactly same when the averages were calculated which may be a first I have seen.