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
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:
OCZ for donating the Power Supply and USB testing SSD
Micron for donating our SATA testing SSD
G.Skill for donating our memory kits
ASUS for donating AMD GPUs and some IO Testing kit
ECS for donating NVIDIA GPUs
ASRock and ADATA for organizing loan of the RAID SSDs
Test Setup
| Processor | Intel i7-3960X (6C/12T, 3.3 GHz) |
| Motherboards | ASRock X79 Extreme11 |
| Cooling | Intel All-In-One Liquid Cooler |
| Power Supply | OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series |
| Memory | GSkill RipjawsZ 4x4 GB DDR3-2400 9-11-11 Kit 1.65 V |
| Memory Settings | XMP |
| Video Cards |
ASUS 7970 3GB GDDR5 ECS GTX 580 1536MB |
| Video Drivers |
Catalyst 12.3 NVIDIA Drivers 296.10 |
| Hard Drive |
Corsair Force GT 60GB Micron RealSSD C300 256GB |
| Case | Open Test Bed - CoolerMaster Lab V1.0 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit |
| SATA Testing | Micron RealSSD C300 256GB |
| RAID Testing | ADATA SX910 256GB |
| USB 2/3 Testing | OCZ Vertex3 240GB |
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a dual 7970 GPU configuration. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
Despite the fact that the PLX chips can be power gated when not in use, at idle there is still a little overhead in power usage from the PLX+LSI combination. Nevertheless, the additional power required by the ASUS ROG boards at loading means that the ASRock draws less power during both Metro 2033 and OCCT.
POST Time
Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.) These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.
Unlike other ASRock motherboards, the X79 Extreme11 actually has a long time to boot. Even longer if you decide to boot from the LSI chip, or have Intel RAID arrays present.
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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?