ASUS Republic of Gamers and X79 ROG Review – Rampage IV Gene, Formula and Extreme

3D Movement Algorithm Test

The algorithms in 3DPM employ both uniform random number generation or normal distribution random number generation, and vary in various amounts of trigonometric operations, conditional statements, generation and rejection, fused operations, etc.  The benchmark runs through six algorithms for a specified number of particles and steps, and calculates the speed of each algorithm, then sums them all for a final score.  This is an example of a real world situation that a computational scientist may find themselves in, rather than a pure synthetic benchmark.  The benchmark is also parallel between particles simulated, and we test the single thread performance as well as the multi-threaded performance.

For single threaded performance, it looks like a stock i7-3770K outperforms a stock i7-3960X by less than 1%.  With the right test, this is a consistent and repeatable difference.

When it comes to multithreaded performance, ultimately six cores will outperform four cores, even with better IPC on four cores.  The X79 ROG motherboards take this a stage further – by applying by default a small overclock on the processor.  Similar to ASUS and Gigabyte Z77 products, the X79 ROG will use the top turbo multiplier in all loads.

WinRAR x64 3.93 - link

With 64-bit WinRAR, we compress the set of files used in the USB speed tests. WinRAR x64 3.93 attempts to use multithreading when possible.

Due to the variable nature of WinRAR to use multiple cores, we would not expect that much of a difference on the ASUS boards.  But it looks like the extra MHz under loading against the other X79 makes a difference, as well as quad channel memory.

FastStone Image Viewer 4.2 - link

FastStone Image Viewer is a free piece of software I have been using for quite a few years now.  It allows quick viewing of flat images, as well as resizing, changing color depth, adding simple text or simple filters.  It also has a bulk image conversion tool, which we use here.  The software currently operates only in single-thread mode, which should change in later versions of the software.  For this test, we convert a series of 170 files, of various resolutions, dimensions and types (of a total size of 163MB), all to the .gif format of 640x480 dimensions.

Being a single threaded test, the ROG motherboards perform well against X79 opposition.  However, the Formula gets a little ahead over the Extreme and Gene.

Xilisoft Video Converter

With XVC, users can convert any type of normal video to any compatible format for smartphones, tablets and other devices.  By default, it uses all available threads on the system, and in the presence of appropriate graphics cards, can utilize CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs as well as AMD APP for AMD GPUs.  For this test, we use a set of 32 HD videos, each lasting 30 seconds, and convert them from 1080p to an iPod H.264 video format using just the CPU.  The time taken to convert these videos gives us our result.

As expected from a multithreaded benchmark, six cores beat four.  In addition, the increase in memory bandwidth will play a part here.

x264 HD Benchmark

The x264 HD Benchmark uses a common HD encoding tool to process an HD MPEG2 source at 1280x720 at 3963 Kbps.  This test represents a standardized result which can be compared across other reviews, and is dependant on both CPU power and memory speed.  The benchmark performs a 2-pass encode, and the results shown are the average of each pass performed four times.