The ASRock X299E-ITX/ac Motherboard Review: An 18-core No-Compromise Mini-ITX

CPU Performance, Short Form

For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC (DDR4-2666 C16) for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.

Here we are including data from all the boards we have tested in the lab, including ones without a formal full review. It is noticeable that the MSI motherboards adopt Multi-Core Turbo, although different boards seem to prioritize different benchmark styles for the turbo.

Blender 2.78: link

For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.

The Blender results here for the ASRock X299E-ITX/ac are last in the pack by about 14 seconds. A fairly significant margin. Settings and results were confirmed, the ITX board ran at 3.7 GHz the entire time with the same primary memory settings as the rest of the tested boards. 

Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, 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 1-2 minutes on high-end platforms.

Nothing outstanding here with POVRay. Though it is the lowest on the charts, it is still within a couple percent difference of most on here. It is matching the overarching theme we are seeing that boards without multi-core boost are performing below those that do (but consume less power).  

Compression – WinRAR 5.4: 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.

With the WinRAR test, the X299E-ITX/ac falls in the middle of the pack, though it was a couple of seconds faster than its other ASRock counterparts. 

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.

Outside of the Gaming Pro Carbon AC, this is also a tightly packed group of results. 

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 win 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.

Another tightly packed set of results here again with the X299E-ITX/ac in the middle grouping. 

Neuron Simulation - DigiCortex v1.20: link

The newest benchmark in our suite is DigiCortex, a simulation of biologically plausible neural network circuits, and simulates the 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. Results are taken during the steady state period in a 32k neuron simulation and represented as a function of the ability to simulate in real time (1.000x equals real-time).

The X299E-ITX/ac manages a last place result here, but is within a couple percent of the rest of the results.