The ASRock Fatal1ty X299 Professional Gaming i9 Motherboard Review
by Joe Shields on September 26, 2017 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gaming
- Intel
- ASRock
- SLI
- Fatal1ty
- CrossFire
- X299
- Skylake-X
- Kaby Lake-X
Benchmark Overview
For our testing, depending on the product, we attempt to tailor the presentation of our global benchmark suite down into what users who would buy this hardware might actually want to run. For CPUs, our full test suite is typically used to gather data and all the results are placed into Bench, our benchmark database for users that want to look at non-typical benchmarks or legacy data. For motherboards we run our short form CPU tests, the gaming tests with half the GPUs of our processor suite, and our system benchmark tests which focus on non-typical and non-obvious performance metrics that are the focal point for specific groups of users.
The benchmarks fall into several areas:
System Benchmarks
Our system benchmarks are designed to probe motherboard controller performance, particularly any additional USB controllers or the audio controller. As general platform tests we have DPC Latency measurements and system boot time, which can be difficult to optimize for on the board design and manufacturing level.
| System Benchmarks | |
| Power Consumption | One of the primary differences between different motherboads is power consumption. Aside from the base defaults that every motherboard needs, things like power delivery, controller choice, routing and firmware can all contribute to how much power a system can draw. This increases for features such as PLX chips and multi-gigabit ethernet. |
| Non-UEFI POST Time | The POST sequence of the motherboard becomes before loading the OS, and involves pre-testing of onboard controllers, the CPU, the DRAM and everything else to ensure base stability. The number of controllers, as well as firmware optimizations, affect the POST time a lot. We test the BIOS defaults as well as attempt a stripped POST. |
| Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.2.5 | Testing onboard audio is difficult, especially with the numerous amount of post-processing packages now being bundled with hardware. Nonetheless, manufacturers put time and effort into offering a 'cleaner' sound that is loud and of a high quality. RMAA, with version 6.2.5 (newer versions have issues), under the right settings can be used to test the signal-to-noise ratio, signal crossover, and harmonic distortion with noise. |
| USB Backup | USB ports can come from a variety of sources: chipsets, controllers or hubs. More often than not, the design of the traces can lead to direct impacts on USB performance as well as firmware level choices relating to signal integrity on the motherboard. |
| DPC Latency | Another element is deferred procedure call latency, or the ability to handle interrupt servicing. Depending on the motherboard firmware and controller selection, some motherboards handle these interrupts quicker than others. A poor result could lead to delays in performance, or for example with audio, a delayed request can manifest in distinct audible pauses, pops or clicks. |
Short Form CPU and GPU Testing
Our short form testing script uses a straight run through of a mixture of known apps or workloads, and requires about four hours. These are typically the CPU tests we run in our motherboard suite, to identify any performance anomalies.
| CPU Short Form Benchmarks | |
| Three Dimensional Particle Movement v2.1 (3DPM) | 3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, derived from my academic research years looking at particle movement parallelism. The coding for this tool was rough, but emulates the real world in being non-CompSci trained code for a scientific endeavor. The code is unoptimized, but the test uses OpenMP to move particles around a field using one of six 3D movement algorithms in turn, each of which is found in the academic literature. |
| The second version of this benchmark is similar to the first, however it has been re-written in VS2012 with one major difference: the code has been written to address the issue of false sharing. If data required by multiple threads, say four, is in the same cache line, the software cannot read the cache line once and split the data to each thread - instead it will read four times in a serial fashion. The new software splits the data to new cache lines so reads can be parallelized and stalls minimized. | |
| WinRAR 5.4 | WinRAR is a compression based software to reduce file size at the expense of CPU cycles. We use the version that has been a stable part of our benchmark database through 2015, and run the default settings on a 1.52GB directory containing over 2800 files representing a small website with around thirty half-minute videos. We take the average of several runs in this instance. |
| POV-Ray 3.7.1 b4 | POV-Ray is a common ray-tracing tool used to generate realistic looking scenes. We've used POV-Ray in its various guises over the years as a good benchmark for performance, as well as a tool on the march to ray-tracing limited immersive environments. We use the built-in multithreaded benchmark. |
| HandBrake v1.0.2 | HandBrake is a freeware video conversion tool. We use the tool in to process two different videos into x264 in an MP4 container - first a 'low quality' two hour video at 640x388 resolution to x264, then a 'high quality' ten minute video at 4320x3840, and finally the second video again but into HEVC. The low quality video scales at lower performance hardware, whereas the buffers required for high-quality tests can stretch even the biggest processors. At current, this is a CPU only test. |
| 7-Zip 9.2 | 7-Zip is a freeware compression/decompression tool that is widely deployed across the world. We run the included benchmark tool using a 50MB library and take the average of a set of fixed-time results. |
| DigiCortex v1.20 | The newest benchmark in our suite is DigiCortex, a simulation of biologically plausible neural network circuits, and simulates activity of neurons and synapses. DigiCortex relies heavily on a mix of DRAM speed and computational throughput, indicating that systems which apply memory profiles properly should benefit and those that play fast and loose with overclocking settings might get some extra speed up. |
| Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation | As with most of our non-platform tests, they are mainly in place to spot differences. For our gaming on X299, we use Ashes of the Singularity as a modern game with up-to-date features to confirm GPU benchmark consistency. |
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ddriver - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
Does it support intel's latest and greatest dual core i3 HEDT cpu? If not - no buy.duploxxx - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
why test on a stupid 7900X cpu?duploxxx - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
bring the 16-18 core and show how the dual memory controller is handling the games, after all this is a gaming board ....ddriver - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
Yeah, and don't forget the games that scale up to 16-18 cores.JeffFlanagan - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
For some reason, people feel the need to stream their games on the Internet, so that only leaves 15-17 cores for the game to use.It seems like an i5 is still a much better value for a gaming machine since most games use very few cores.
duploxxx - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
the reason i ask is because threadripper reviews all over the net were hammered with the poor gaming benchies en the reason for specifc settings. guess what, no gaming benchies on the HCC designs from Intel that have the same memory disadvantage.OhWhateverOnceMore - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
"i9" ...ok..."Professional" ... uh uh...
"Gaming" ... /r/hmmm
TEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
Is there an Intel co-marketing kick-back for having a "Gaming" branding? You see it everywhere...oRAirwolf - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
"Curiously, for a motherboard which has "gaming" in the title and having three network ports, we were surprised not to see a Killer Network based NIC which finds its way on to several other gaming motherboards. Network traffic shaping is still possible through software, although Rivet Networks would likely claim they offer an optimized solution if their chip had been used. Perhaps a combination of an Intel GbE, Rivet Networks Killer E2500 GbE, and an Aquantia 10GbE which would have encompassed more of its tarket market."Wutness? Why on Earth would you want to see Killer on a gaming board? ASUS has shown through their own testing that Killer NIC's are trash:
https://rog.asus.com/articles/product-news/tried-a...
That aforementioned paragraph seriously makes me question the legitimacy of reviews on this site now. It is common knowledge that Killer is absolute and utter trash.
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
Oh you beat me to the point here. This is one of very rare times when I'd agree that there appears to be a certain amount of institutional bias at Anandtech in favor of Killer NICs. If you do a search for the string "Rivet Networks" in AT's search box you can find this article from September 2016:https://www.anandtech.com/show/10679/rivet-network...
It looks like that was sort of ground zero for that opinion and it's stuck since. In the comments of that article (disclosure - I was a participant with cynical views of Killer NICs even back then for reasons I make clear in those comments) there was discussion about reviewing and analyzing the E2500. Anandtech has never presented such a review or supplied readers with any data supporting the idea that Killer NICs are somehow superior or worthy of being sought out by consumers. Despite lacking reliable test data, there's still unexplained support in the form of hint-dropped lines like the one you've quoted that imply a certain subset of readers should be seeking out Killer NIC-equipped products or that its somehow unusual that a premium motherboard omits them.
I find the whole thing does hurt Anandtech's credibility. If there's data that supports a Killer NIC being a better option, gather it and publish it. Don't assert and insinuate without any substantially supportive information to a group of people (gamers in this case) without being able to back up those claims. Killer NICs can be acquired for testing. Maybe Rivet's people would supply a product for testing. If Rivet doesn't or does and Anandtech doesn't test it, then what else do we have to go on? Consumers in the target audience are already broadly suspicious of the benefits Rivet claims Killer NICs offer to the point where it seems almost delusional to boost them in a motherboard review.