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
CPU Performance
Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, memory subtimings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.
For reference, the X99 Extreme11 does implement MultiCore Turbo on the M1.01A BIOS we used.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link
Similarly to WinRAR, the FastStone test us updated for 2014 to the latest version. FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and thus single threaded performance is often the winner.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. The principle today is still the same, primarily as an output for H.264 + AAC/MP3 audio within an MKV container. In our test we use the same videos as in the Xilisoft test, and results are given in frames per second.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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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!