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How We Test

Unable to find any sub-$200 boards in our test arsenal to compare, we’re putting the MAG Z390 Tomahawk up against the sub-$250 Z390 Taichi and Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon motherboards from ASRock and MSI.

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Sound	Integrated HD audio
Network	Integrated gigabit networking
Graphics Driver	GeForce 399.24

The same platform that cooled the 10 cores of our Core i9-7900X worked equally well with the eight cores of the Core i9-9900K, as we’ll show in the overclocking evaluation on the next page.

Comparison Products

MSI MAG Z390 Tomahawk

ASRock Z390 Taichi Ultimate

MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon

Benchmark Settings

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Synthetic Benchmarks & Settings
PCMark 8	Version 2.7.613Home, Creative, Work, Storage, Applications (Adobe & Microsoft)
3DMark 13	Version 4.47.597.0Skydiver, Firestrike, Firestrike Extreme Default Presets
SiSoftware Sandra	Version 2016.03.22.21CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cryptography, Memory Bandwidth
DiskSPD	4K Random Read, 4K Random Write128K Sequential Read, 128K Sequential Write
Cinebench R15	Build RC83328DEMOOpenGL Benchmark
CompuBench	Version 1.5.8Face Detection, Optical Flow, Ocean Surface, Ray Tracing
Application Tests & Settings
LAME MP3	Version 3.98.3Mixed 271MB WAV to mp3: Command: -b 160 --nores (160Kb/s)
HandBrake CLI	Version: 0.9.9Sintel Open Movie Project: 4.19GB 4K mkv to x265 mp4
Blender	Version 2.68aBMW 27 CPU Render Benchmark, BMW 27 GPU Render Benchmark
7-Zip	Version 16.02THG-Workload (7.6GB) to .7z, command line switches "a -t7z -r -m0=LZMA2 -mx=9"
Adobe After Effects CC	Release 2015.3.0, Version 13.8.0.144PCMark-driven routine
Adobe Photoshop CC	Release 2015.5.0, 20160603.r.88 x64PCMark-driven routine (light and heavy)
Adobe InDesign CC	Release 2015.4, Build 11.4.0.90 x64PCMark-driven routine
Adobe Illustrator	Release 2015.3.0, Version 20.0.0 (64-bit)PCMark-driven routine
Game Tests & Settings
*Ashes of the Singularity*	Version 1.31.21360High Preset - 1920 x 1080, Mid Shadow Quality, 1x MSAACrazy Preset - 1920 x 1080, High Shadow Quality, 2x MSAA
*F1 2015*	2015 Season, Abu Dhabi track, RainMedium Preset, no AFUltra High Preset, 16x AF
*Metro: Last Light Redux*	Version 3.00 x64High Quality, 1920 x 1080, High Tesselation, 16x AFVery High Quality, 1920 x 1080, Very High Tesselation, 16x AF
*The Talos Principle*	Version 267252Medium Preset, High Quality, High Tesselation, 4x AFUltra Preset, Very High Quality, Very High Tesselation, 16x AF