ASUS Z97-Pro Wi-Fi AC Intel Z97 Motherboard Review

System Power Consumption & Network Performance

The ASUS Z97-Pro [Wi-Fi ac] was pulling a hair more power at the wall than the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD5TH. When both systems were sitting Idle, the ASUS Z97-Pro was pulling 79 Watts at the wall, while the GIGABYTE board was hitting 67 Watts. Loading up the CPU with the AIDA64 system stability test, the ASUS Z97-Pro [Wi-Fi ac] peaked at 146 Watts at the wall while the Z87X-UD5TH hit 143 Watts at the wall. During 3DMark Firestrike the ASUS Z97-Pro peaked at 239 Watts at the wall while the Z87X was 2 Watts lower at 237 Watts at the wall.

We wanted to test the Wi-Fi GO! wireless adapter in a real world application so we connected the antenna’s. installed it inside running Windows 8.1 64-bit and configured it using Automatic settings for both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands. To test the wireless performance we used our custom water cooled Mini-ITX PC that was directly connected to the ASUS RT-AC66U Dual-Band Wireless-AC1750 Gigabit 802.11ac Router.

We used the desktop to run LAN Speed Server and then ran LAN Speed Test on the system with the wireless card to test throughput.

We left the router in default mode, so the SSID name for untouched and we let it automatically choose the channel to connect to. This means that the router was left in Unsecure Mode (for fastest data throughput), and with WMM / QoS turned ON. After connecting, we ran the PC application LAN Speed Test (LST) to measure file transfer and network speeds. LST builds a file in memory and then transfers the packet without the effects of windows file caching. It then reports the time and calculates the network speed. We ran inSSIDer to make sure the networks were not overlapping with any of the 20+ surrounding ones and they were not.

Intel I218-V 1MB Packets:

The Intel I218-V Gigabit LAN controller is plenty fast on the 1MB packet test. The write speeds hit 839.2Mbps and the Read speeds hit 892.5Mbps.

Intel I218-v 100MB Packets:

Increasing the packet size to 100MB we lost a little bit of performance from the 1MB tests. The write speed dropped to 817.4Mbps and the read dropped to 814.4Mbps.

Wi-Fi 1MB Packets:

The write speed of the ASUS Z97-Pro Wi-Fi ac was solid at 1121.2Mbps and the read speed was great at 363.8Mbps.

Wi-Fi 100MB Packets:

Increasing the packet size to 100Mb the performance dropped a hair, the write speed came down to 100.9Mbps and the Read speed dropped to 333.6Mbps.