ASRock X79 Extreme11 Review: PCIe 3.0 x16/x16/x16/x16 and LSI 8-Way SAS/SATA
by Ian Cutress on September 3, 2012 10:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- ASRock
- X79
- LSI
- PLX
ASRock X79 Extreme11
To conclude, it is hard to judge a motherboard like the ASRock X79 Extreme11. With no other major competing products offering similar functionality, ASRock can charge a pretty penny for the product. However, does it still retain the usefulness or bang for buck in terms of performance?
For your $600 of green, the main selling point is the X79 platform mixed with two PLX PEX 8747 chips which allow four PCIe devices to be run at x16/x16/x16/x16 in PCIe 3.0 or up to seven devices to be run at x16/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8 also in PCIe 3.0. This combination leaves eight PCIe 3.0 lanes from the CPU, which are directed straight into an LSI SAS 2308 PCIe 3.0 RAID controller. This LSI chip gives eight ports capable of SAS2/SATA 6 Gbps speeds, in RAID 0, 1 or 10 configurations. An equivalent PCIe 3.0 card would set a user back several hundred as well as taking up a PCIe slot.
On top of the PLX and LSI chips, we also get a full-bodied X79 motherboard, featuring eight memory slots, dual Broadcom NIC capable of Teaming/Link Aggregation, a Creative Core3D sound chip, enhanced power delivery, and eight USB 3.0 ports via TI controllers. Software comes in the XFast flavors, with XFast RAM taking advantage of the ability of X79 to hold more memory. The board itself is also supports a multitude of Xeon processors, as well as ECC memory with the Xeons. There is a good amount in the box too, such as six SATA cables and a USB 3.0 panel, but it should be noted that this internal bundle is similar to cheaper ASRock products. The only thing missing in my opinion would be a WiFi connection on the IO, similar to that done by ECS.
Performance wise, the X79 Extreme11 does not win many accolades. It performs similarly or worse than other X79 motherboards in the market - in our GPU testing, the board continuously came near the bottom. The separation ASRock likes to make with the X79 Extreme11 is the PCIe functionality and the ability to include SAS drives on board - the speed of the extra ports reached a staggering 4.0 GBps, even though that may not be a realistic use scenario. The extra ports also are a little hampered by not having additional cache to help with writing short transfer sizes like on a PCIe card.
With our testing, and the price range of this motherboard, it is safe to say that this product is more aimed at workstation projects, such as an 8-core Xeon with ECC, rather than a product for gamers or overclockers. Tool it up with eight SAS drives, seven single slot GPUs, and away you go with a nice number crunching machine. Instead of paying in terms of price for performance, we are all talking about price for functionality here.
As a technical exercise, what ASRock have done is pretty amazing. In terms of pure innovation in a relatively stagnant market, I have to award the ASRock X79 Extreme11 a bronze award for pushing boundaries and enabling innovation in the motherboard market. This motherboard, paired with a deep wallet, could be a number crunching machine for video or audio enthusiasts, or GPU crunchers who yearn PCIe bandwidth but also SAS compatibility. This is strictly an enthusiast’s motherboard.
ASRock X79 Extreme11
AnandTech Editor’s Choice Bronze Award
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sor - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - link
Yeah, server guys know that's standard. These chips are nice for external JBODs for things like ZFS, and for simple redundancy levels. Quite often, however, when they're on the motherboard there's a header and module you can purchase/install to enable RAID5.Snuddi - Monday, September 3, 2012 - link
Please performe some RAID10 benchmarks on this. As I have read acorss forums the RAID10 results are horrible (I have tried this on my own also).With 8x 1TB disk's in RAID10 I get simuar speed as a single HDD.
So it would be great if you could test this in your test system. If numbers are horrible as I belive they will be, then AsRock will have some pressure on fixing that.
blacksun1234 - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - link
Please enable "Disk Cache Policy" in LSI MegaRAID utility and test again. It improve a lot.yahodahan - Monday, September 3, 2012 - link
Anandtech is a great review site, but there really needs to be a properly useful benchmark here.We're talking about a board that is built for massive GPU compute, so how about an actual GPU compute benchmark? Otherwise, this review has a massive, massive hole in it.
Blender is free. Cycles is free. They have benchmark files ready to open and click "run", it's not a big hassle. And it will push every single GPU to 100%, thrash this board in a real test, and give us (people who intend to actually use the board for real GPU work, as it was intended), the data we need most.
There's so much detailed info in this article, and I appreciate that, but it's honestly missing the most important part, it would be great to see a proper follow-up/etc to fix this.
cjb110 - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - link
Blender might be free, but time isn't! Even if they ran the test, a single number on its own would be useless...esp to the general reader.It was mentioned in the review that this product is a little out of the norm for their testing.
But it is handled consistent with their other reviews, which makes more sense, than running a bunch of tests with no comparison points.
If you want a specialised review for the boards target market I'm sure they're out there.
But maybe Blender could be included in the standard test suite, could cut down the number of game tests (these don't seem to differ much between boards).
yahodahan - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - link
Sure, but that's the point: a review like this should take the time to focus directly on what actually matters, and in this case that is GPU compute performance (and RAID, for others).This board is a specialty case, and should be treated as such. Drop in 4 GPU's at x16 each, then 6 at x8, and do a render to see if there is a difference.
Then, test on a board with two "real" (non PLEX) x16 slots, and see if there is a difference vs 2 x16 on this boards "multiplied" channels.
This would give some numbers that are really, truly meaningful. Yes, it would take time, but why was time taken to benchmark it on games/etc, when it's been shown time and again that those numbers simply don't change and mean practically nothing?
What I'm trying to say is, this board is for a niche market- so please, test it for that niche market, not for the general masses that will never, ever use it.
ggathagan - Wednesday, September 5, 2012 - link
There's the very real possibility that Ian doesn't have 4 GPU's to test with.error451 - Wednesday, September 5, 2012 - link
Then whats the point of testing the board if your not going to benchmark its main selling points and features? This is a specialized motherboard that should have had a specialized review. Just running their standard game and video encoding benchmarks is a waste.This issue pops up every time Anandtech does a review of a non gamer/mass market product. They tell you about all the cool features and then run their standard review suite.
MadMan007 - Monday, September 3, 2012 - link
Know what makes this motherboard so great? It goes to 11!gkatz - Monday, September 3, 2012 - link
Can someone explain to me under what circumstances you might need 22 USB ports?