The ASRock X99 Extreme11 Review: Eighteen SATA Ports with Haswell-E
by Ian Cutress on March 11, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Storage
- ASRock
- X99
- LGA2011-3
ASRock X99 Extreme11 In The Box
With money-is-no-object type motherboards, the package has to consider the market. Do prosumers want 18 SATA cables, or are they using a system with a backplane that comes with it all? Are buyers going to want to game, or are they Xeon Phi users for compute and don't need SLI bridges? One could argue that given the cost of the package, it should all be bundled anyway to encompass all users, but event at this price bracket if the manufacturer can save a few cents, they might do so.
In the ASRock X99 Extreme11 box we get the following:
Driver DVD
User Manuals
Rear IO Shield
HDD Saver Cable
Six SATA Cables
Two Rigid 2-way dual-slot SLI connectors
One Rigid 2-way quad-slot SLI connector
One Rigid 4-way SLI connector
Two M.2 Screws
A Carry Bag
This is pretty much what I would have expected from a motherboard like this. As it does not fall under the gaming or overclocking lines, there are no gaming or OC add-ons: just cables and SLI bridges. It might have been interesting to have included a drive bay for the two onboard USB 3.0 headers, especially one that might fit a boot drive also. Perhaps because in 2015 a lot of cases come with at least one USB 3.1 header now, ASRock sees little need.
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs and SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.
Test Setup
| Test Setup | |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-5960X ES 8 Cores, 16 Threads, 3.0 GHz (3.5 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards | ASRock X99 Extreme11 |
| Cooling | Cooler Master Nepton 140XL |
| Power Supply | OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
| Memory | Corsair DDR4-2133 C15 4x8 GB 1.2V G.Skill Ripjaws 4 DDR4-2133 C15 4x8 GB 1.2V |
| Memory Settings | JEDEC @ 2133 |
| Video Cards | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB (1150/1202 Boost) |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA Drivers 332.21 |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 |
ASRock X99 Extreme11 Overclocking
Experience with ASRock X99 Extreme11
While the positioning of the Extreme11 indicates it is a board more so for functionality rather than overclocking, it does offer ASRock’s base array of overclocking options in both the BIOS and software. This includes the Optimized CPU OC Configuration drop downs in both the BIOS and software, although it should be noted that Xeons cannot overclock via the multiplier.
With our mediocre CPU, the automatic overclocks at 4.4 GHz and beyond caused BSODs when under AVX load, but manual overclocking did give 4.4 GHz at a rather high voltage. There is not much to conclude, due to our processor not being the best, but other motherboards have achieved around the same result with the CPU we have.
Methodology
Our standard overclocking methodology is as follows. We select the automatic overclock options and test for stability with PovRay and OCCT to simulate high-end workloads. These stability tests aim to catch any immediate causes for memory or CPU errors.
For manual overclocks, based on the information gathered from previous testing, starts off at a nominal voltage and CPU multiplier, and the multiplier is increased until the stability tests are failed. The CPU voltage is increased gradually until the stability tests are passed, and the process repeated until the motherboard reduces the multiplier automatically (due to safety protocol) or the CPU temperature reaches a stupidly high level (100ºC+). Our test bed is not in a case, which should push overclocks higher with fresher (cooler) air.
Overclock Results
Power delta between the stock and highest overclocked performance gives +152W, and when allowing for the 140W TDP gives an estimated total power consumption at 292W when overclocked to 4.4 GHz.
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duploxxx - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
board to differentiate with 18 ports, but anandtech does not test the performance of each type of port. then why bother posting this review? waste of time, for the rest this is just another board out of the 101Gnarr - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
I have to agree with duploxxx. This board seriously needs a storage benchmark.petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
no, board doesn't need storage benchmark, you lack some experience with SAS.dicobalt - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
This board is for people who play games and happen to have a buttload of porn. Don't act like it's for anything else.niva - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
This is exactly why we are extremely interested in this board. Is there a problem?petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
Get at a TV and watch porn there; you can't afford this mobo anyway.austinsguitar - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
I will side with you duploxx... there is no reason to buy this board except to get those sata ports.... why in the HELL is this without that kind of test... anandtech.... what are you doin...Tchamber - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Yeah, that's much too harsh. Any one who has followed SSD/SATA on this site for the last three or so years knows that SATA is already saturated. There's no longer any reason to test a board's storage performance.abufrejoval - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
I believe that’s a little harsh!With the information you have been provided on this site, you can use your own powers of deduction to come up with answers.
To expect that Ian go through all the potential permutations and variants is a little much, especially when the technical limitations are clear and testing software RAIDs is beyond the scope of the article.
With everything south of the DMI passing through the equivalent of 4 PCIe 2.0 or lanes or 16Gbit/s of bandwidth, you can deduce that 10x 6Gbit SATA ports won't deliver 60Gbit/s to the CPU, especially with network, USB and all other peripheral traffic hanging in there as well.
So if you hang SSDs on all these PCH ports, that's because you like them quiet or with fast access times, not because you expect their aggregate bandwidth to arrive at the CPU.
Beyond the limits of the DMI I doubt you'll see any significant bottleneck inside the PCH so you can do your math: Any single 6Gbit SATA drive capable of delivering 6Gbit of data will very likely have that data actually arrive at that speed at the CPU. Any combination of SATA drives on the PCH will be bandwidth constrained at 16Gbit.
The Avago/LSI 3008 at 8x PCIe 3.0 (63Gbit/s) has a pretty good chance to deliver top 8-port SATA (48Gbit/s) performance without creating much of a bottleneck, while 8x12GBit SAS (96Gbit/s) would potentially fail to deliver with that chip. On the other hand LSI chips typically deliver top performance, that is very close to the theoretical maximum the connections allow, even with RAID5 and RAID6 on the chip.
So there you go: The Avago/LSI SAS HBA has a very good chance of delivering the aggregate bandwidth you expect even if loaded with top notch SSDs, while the 10Port PCH is most likely better used with spinning rust.
wyewye - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Abufrejoval, that's not a review, that's a butt-load of theoretical assumptions. Assumptions are the mother of fuckups. In practice you may discover different numbers, hence we read reviews online before buying.Stop apologizing for Ian's incompetence/lazyness!