System Specs & Memory Bandwidth

Haswell System Specs
  • Intel Core i7-4790 (3.6GHz - 4.0GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-4770K (3.5GHz - 3.9GHz)
  • Asrock Z97 Extreme 6 Intel Z97)
  • Asrock Z79X Killer (Intel Z97)
  • Gigabyte Z97X-SOC Force (Intel Z97)
  • 8GB DDR3 RAM
  • Palit GeForce GTX 780
  • Samsung SSD 840 Pro
  • Silverstone Strider Series 700w
  • Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
AMD Vishera System Specs
  • AMD FX-8350 (4.2GHz - 4.40GHz)
  • Asrock 990FX Professional
  • 8GB DDR3 RAM
  • Palit GeForce GTX 780
  • Samsung SSD 840 Pro
  • Silverstone Strider Series 700w
  • Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit

The Gigabyte Z97X-SOC Force delivered 29.3GB/s for a huge 2GB/s lead over the Asrock Z97 boards. Having checked memory timings and frequencies, we're not sure how the Gigabyte Z97 board came up with the extra performance. Either the Z97X-SOC Force is unusually fast or the Asrock boards are slow, perhaps due to immature BIOS revisions. Unfortunately, we don't know until we test more boards.

Thankfully, despite the difference in memory bandwidth performance, both the Asrock and Gigabyte boards delivered virtually the same L2 and L3 cache performance. It is interesting to note that the slightly higher clocked Core i7-4790 wasn't any faster here.