Application Performance
Despite producing around 11% less bandwidth than the Asus Z97 motherboard, we find that the Asrock Z97 Extreme6 and Extreme9 were faster when testing with WinRAR. The Asrock Z97 Extreme9 was almost 5% faster than the Asus Z97-Deluxe here while the Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H-BK produced the best result with 10573KB/s and the EVGA Z97 FTW delivered the worst with just 9906KB/s.
The Excel 2013 results were extremely close amongst the seven Z97 motherboards tested. Despite there being just 0.4 seconds separating the fastest and slowest board, this did mean that the $210 Asus Z97-Pro WiFi/AC was ironically 10% faster than the $275 Asus Z97-Deluxe.
When testing with Photoshop CC we see almost 1 second separating the slowest motherboard from the fastest. This time Asus' Z97-Deluxe was the fastest while its Z97-Pro WiFi/AC was the slowest.