MSI Z170A Gaming M5 Review

Written by Antony Leather

September 11, 2015 | 09:09

Tags: #best-z170-board #lga1151 #lga1151-board #micro-atx-board #skylake #z170

Companies: #msi

Terragen 3

Website: Terragen 3

Planetside Software’s Terragen 3 is a highly realistic landscape generator used to create background images in films and games such as Star Trek: Nemesis, Stealth and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Our script renders a single frame of a snowy mountain scene at 640 x 480 on all the available CPU execution units.

Terragen 3

Snowy scene render time

  • Asus Z170-Deluxe (4GHz/4.8GHz)
  • MSI Z170A Gaming M5 (4GHz/4.6GHz)
  • Asus Maximus VIII Gene (4GHz/4.8GHz)
    • 370
    • 332
    • 372
    • 342
    • 375
    • 334
0
100
200
300
400
Seconds, lower is better
  • Stock
  • Overclocked

Cinebench R15 64-bit

Website: www.maxon.net

Cinebench uses Maxon's Cinema 4D engine to render a photo-realistic scene of some shiny balls and weird things (we miss the motorbike). The scene is highly complex, with reflections, ambient occlusion and procedural shaders so it gives a CPU a tough workout.

As Cinema 4D is a real-world application - used on films such as Spider-Man and Star Wars - Cinebench can be viewed as a real-world benchmark.

Cinebench R15

64-bit, CPU test

  • Asus Maximus VIII Gene (4GHz/4.8GHz)
  • Asus Z170-Deluxe (4GHz/4.8GHz)
  • MSI Z170A Gaming M5 (4GHz/4.6GHz)
    • 925
    • 1040
    • 904
    • 1017
    • 929
    • 1009
0
250
500
750
1000
Score, higher is better
  • Stock Speed
  • Overclocked

Power Consumption

Website: Prime95

For the power consumption tests, we measure via a power meter at the wall, so the numbers below are of total system power draw from the mains, not the power consumption of a CPU itself. Measuring the power draw of any individual component in a PC is tricky to impossible to acheive. We use Prime95's smallFFT test to put the CPU under 100 percent load, while idle power results were taken with the PC sitting at a Windows Aero-enabled desktop.

Power Consumption (Idle)

Windows Aero enabled

  • Asus Maximus VIII Gene (4GHz/4.8GHz)
  • MSI Z170A Gaming M5 (4GHz/4.6GHz)
  • Asus Z170-Deluxe (4GHz/4.8GHz)
    • 53
    • 70
    • 56
    • 73
    • 62
    • 77
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
Watts, lower is better
  • Stock Speed
  • Overclocked

Power Consumption (Load)

Windows Aero enabled

  • Asus Maximus VIII Gene (4GHz/4.8GHz)
  • MSI Z170A Gaming M5 (4GHz/4.6GHz)
  • Asus Z170-Deluxe (4GHz/4.8GHz)
    • 113
    • 172
    • 144
    • 186
    • 148
    • 197
0
50
100
150
200
Watts, lower is better
  • Stock Speed
  • Overclocked

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