To test the abilities of a given motherboard, we have broken down testing into multiple categories:
1) System Benchmarks, which consists of test that stress the entire system in synthetic and real world scenarios.
2) Synthetic Game Benchmarks which mainly stress the GPU and CPU combination, and consists of various games builtin benchmark.
3) Real World In-Game Benchmarks which consist of timed real world game play results using FRAPS and multiple modern PC games.
The full list of the applications that we utilized in our benchmarking suite:
Cinebench R15
3DMark 8
WinRAR
x264 HD Benchmark
AIDA64
Sleeping Dogs
Metro: Last Light
BioShock Infinite
Crysis 3
Batman: Arkham Origins
Tomb Raider
Battliefield 4
Assassins Creed: Black Flag
Call of Duty: Ghosts
System Components Used:
Processor: Intel 5930K
Memory: 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3333
Cooling: Corsair H110i AIO
Video Card(s): NIVIDIA GTX 980
SSD: 1x Seagate 600 Pro 400GB, 2x Intel DC S3700 800GB SSDs.
Power Supply: Corsair AX860i
OS: Windows 8.1