MAINGEAR Vybe Gaming PC Review – Intel Core i7-6700K & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti

Maingear Vybe Z170 i7-6700K Performance

Before taking a look at the Vybe Z170 benchmarks, we need to keep in mind that this is a major change from previous tests, any comparison to other scores should take this into account. First, we have a new processor with the Skylake i7-6700K; then a new motherboard chipset Intel Z170 and finally a new operating system with Windows 10 Home. All of these have just been released and tweaks to each of them will be done for drivers and optimization.

Futuremark 3DMark has several different integrated benchmarks available, most common for gaming PC’s is the FireStrike benchmark. FireStrike is broken down into three different tests depending on the resolution you want to run at from 1080p, 1440p and finally 4K. We took a look at all three of these and found that the MAINGEAR Vybe system running the PNY GTX 980Ti performed rather well. Taking a look at similar tests Legit Reviews has done with this video card the Extreme score is slightly higher (around 150 points), while the Ultra score is slightly lower (close to 90 points).

Like 3DMark, PCMark has multiple benchmarks depending on the typical workload you are wanting to do. We will be taking a look at the Home Accelerated benchmark that reflects common tasks that a typical home user might perform. These tasks include photo editing, typing, web browsing, video chat and casual gaming. The MAINGEAR Vybe Z170 did extremely well with PCMark 8, receiving a final score of 5210.

Maxon Cinebench R15 is a great benchmark for 3D content creators as it is based on the award winning animation software, CINEMA 4D which is used in many blockbuster movies. For OpenGL we received a score of 169.34FPS. The CPU score came in at 925, and 182 for single core usage. This is right in line for other tests we have done with this CPU.

X264 is a great reproducible measurement of how fast the machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. All tests done with the same version number can be compared as it uses the same video clip and settings. The first pass of the encoding process the MAINGEAR Vybe Z170 with the i7-6700k received 99.215FPS on average. The second pass came in at 20.355FPS.

Using Sisoft Sandra’s Memory Bandwidth benchmark we could see that the Corsair Vengeance DDR4 memory kit was going around 31GB/s and 32GB/s in the various tests that the Memory Bandwidth benchmark performs.

The Intel i7-6700K received a 133.52GOPS in the Aggregate test in Sandra’s Processor Arithmetic benchmark.

The final Sisoft Sandra benchmark that we will take a look at is the Multi-Media performance, where the Intel i7-6700K received a 337.77MPix/s.

The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer (POV-RAY) is a high-quality tool used for creating three dimensional graphics. It includes an automated benchmark which allows for results to be compared across multiple systems without worrying about settings. In POV-RAY we received 1896.08PPS when running at stock speeds.

TrueCrypt is a freeware encryption utility for on-the-fly encryption. It includes a simple benchmark providing a good estimate on how well the system can handle various encryption schemes. We took a look at the AES performance within TrueCrypt and found that it rated the performance of the MAINGEAR Vybe Z170 at 5.6GB/s.

After doing a couple of reboots to make sure there were no pending installs, the boot time started to level out. Taking around 18 seconds to boot to the desktop isn’t too bad. As you might expect, there were times where it might be a little faster, the fastest was close to 16 seconds, and times a little slower; BootRacer was reporting that the boot time was quite stable. 18 seconds seemed to be an average boot time for the MAINGEAR Vybe Z170 with Windows 10 Home 64-Bit.