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
Gaming Performance on GTX 770s
F1 2013
First up is F1 2013 by Codemasters. I am a big Formula 1 fan in my spare time, and nothing makes me happier than carving up the field in a Caterham, waving to the Red Bulls as I drive by (because I play on easy and take shortcuts). F1 2013 uses the EGO Engine, and like other Codemasters games ends up being very playable on old hardware quite easily. In order to beef up the benchmark a bit, we devised the following scenario for the benchmark mode: one lap of Spa-Francorchamps in the heavy wet, the benchmark follows Jenson Button in the McLaren who starts on the grid in 22nd place, with the field made up of 11 Williams cars, 5 Marussia and 5 Caterham in that order. This puts emphasis on the CPU to handle the AI in the wet, and allows for a good amount of overtaking during the automated benchmark. We test at 1920x1080 on Ultra graphical settings.
Bioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite was Zero Punctuation’s Game of the Year for 2013, uses the Unreal Engine 3, and is designed to scale with both cores and graphical prowess. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
Tomb Raider
The next benchmark in our test is Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider is an AMD optimized game, lauded for its use of TressFX creating dynamic hair to increase the immersion in game. Tomb Raider uses a modified version of the Crystal Engine, and enjoys raw horsepower. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
Sleeping Dogs
Sleeping Dogs is a benchmarking wet dream – a highly complex benchmark that can bring the toughest setup and high resolutions down into single figures. Having an extreme SSAO setting can do that, but at the right settings Sleeping Dogs is highly playable and enjoyable. We run the basic benchmark program laid out in the Adrenaline benchmark tool, and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
58 Comments
View All Comments
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!