ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Apex Encore Motherboard Review

3DMark Timespy Extreme

3DMark Time Spy Extreme is a Windows benchmark test that uses DirectX 12 to measure the performance of your gaming PC. It consists of two graphics tests and a CPU test that show complex scenes and simulate game physics and logic. It calculates a score for each test and a combined score for the whole test. You can use it to compare your system with others, test its stability and reliability, and optimize it for better gaming performance.

3DMark is available on Steam here.

This is definitely a fast motherboard, scoring 9016 points in TimeSpy, which isn’t all that far from the competition, but also shows us there’s no issues with bottlenecks in the CPU and GPU pipelines.

PCMark 10 Express

PCMark 10 Express is a shorter benchmark that focuses on basic home PC use. It includes the Essentials and Productivity test groups. It is less demanding than the main PCMark 10 benchmark. The Essentials test group covers the common tasks that people do every day with their PCs, such as web browsing, video conferencing, and app start-up time. The Productivity test group measures system performance with everyday office applications, such as writing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Available now on Steam.

In PCMark 10 Express, it scored well again, hitting 6579 points, which is pretty much in line with the competition, and again shows that our CPU, memory and SSD are all working well here.

Super PI 2.1 WP

Super PI is a single-threaded benchmark that calculates pi to a specific number of digits. It uses the Gauss-Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of a program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute pi to 232 digits.

Available now on Super PI.

This is a much more CPU performance-focused task, with strong reliance on good memory performance too, 390 seconds isn’t the best time though, and while about on par with the competition, there’s certainly room for improvement here.

Cinebench R23

Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s hardware capabilities. Improvements to Cinebench Release 23 reflect the overall advancements to CPU and rendering technology in recent years, providing a more accurate measurement of Cinema 4D’s ability to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and modern processor features available to the average user.

Available now on Maxon.

Cinebench is a good test of the CPU single and multi-core performance, and at 25905 points, it’s pretty good, but again, not exactly leading the pack here either, but certainly no cause for concern either.

AIDA64

AIDA64 memory benchmark is a feature of AIDA64, a system information and diagnostics software. It measures the bandwidth and latency of the CPU caches and the system memory by performing various read, write, copy, and latency tests. It uses different instruction set extensions and optimizations depending on the processor and memory type. It also supports multi-threading, multi-processor, and multi-core systems. You can use it to compare your system performance with others, test its stability and reliability, and optimize it for better performance.

Available now on AIDA64.

Memory performance is very consistent, hitting the sort of speeds we would expect from our DDR5 memory, and while not the fastest performance, again it’s right on par with the competition.