The PLX Arrangement

The P9X79-E WS has an interesting chipset diagram – in order to power each of the seven PCIe lanes in the specified x16/x8/x8/x8/x16/x8/x8 way, ASUS uses a PLX switch which acts as a FIFO buffer/mux and increase bandwidth to the GPUs that need it most, a sort of ‘fill twice pour once’ approach.  We covered the chipset diagram earlier in the review:

In this diagram the thick lines are where x16 lanes are directed, and the thin lanes are x8.  So PCIe 3 has 8 lanes from the PLX and 8 lanes from the Quick Switch normally, but when PCIe 2 is populated, the Quick Switch will move the eight lanes over to PCIe 2.

But the effect on gaming can amount to 1-2% per PLX chip, as shown in our previous reviews.  This appears again in the P9X79-E WS, but this is a small price to pay for having functionality up to seven PCIe devices.

Metro2033

Our first analysis is with the perennial reviewers’ favorite, Metro2033.  It occurs in a lot of reviews for a couple of reasons – it has a very easy to use benchmark GUI that anyone can use, and it is often very GPU limited, at least in single GPU mode.  Metro2033 is a strenuous DX11 benchmark that can challenge most systems that try to run it at any high-end settings.  Developed by 4A Games and released in March 2010, we use the inbuilt DirectX 11 Frontline benchmark to test the hardware at 1440p with full graphical settings.  Results are given as the average frame rate from a second batch of 4 runs, as Metro has a tendency to inflate the scores for the first batch by up to 5%.

Metro 2033 - One 7970, 1440p, Max Settings

Metro 2033 1 GPU 2 GPU 3 GPU
AMD
NVIDIA  

Dirt 3

Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters.  Dirt 3 also falls under the list of ‘games with a handy benchmark mode’.  In previous testing, Dirt 3 has always seemed to love cores, memory, GPUs, PCIe lane bandwidth, everything.  The small issue with Dirt 3 is that depending on the benchmark mode tested, the benchmark launcher is not indicative of game play per se, citing numbers higher than actually observed.  Despite this, the benchmark mode also includes an element of uncertainty, by actually driving a race, rather than a predetermined sequence of events such as Metro 2033.  This in essence should make the benchmark more variable, but we take repeated in order to smooth this out.  Using the benchmark mode, Dirt 3 is run at 1440p with Ultra graphical settings.  Results are reported as the average frame rate across four runs.

Dirt 3 - One 7970, 1440p, Max Settings

Dirt 3 1 GPU 2 GPU 3 GPU
AMD
NVIDIA  

Civilization V

A game that has plagued my testing over the past twelve months is Civilization V.  Being on the older 12.3 Catalyst drivers were somewhat of a nightmare, giving no scaling, and as a result I dropped it from my test suite after only a couple of reviews.  With the later drivers used for this review, the situation has improved but only slightly, as you will see below.  Civilization V seems to run into a scaling bottleneck very early on, and any additional GPU allocation only causes worse performance.

Our Civilization V testing uses Ryan’s GPU benchmark test all wrapped up in a neat batch file.  We test at 1080p, and report the average frame rate of a 5 minute test.

Civilization V - One 7970, 1440p, Max Settings

Civilization V 1 GPU 2 GPU 3 GPU
AMD
NVIDIA  

Sleeping Dogs

While not necessarily a game on everybody’s lips, Sleeping Dogs is a strenuous game with a pretty hardcore benchmark that scales well with additional GPU power due to its SSAA implementation.  The team over at Adrenaline.com.br is supreme for making an easy to use benchmark GUI, allowing a numpty like me to charge ahead with a set of four 1440p runs with maximum graphical settings.

Sleeping Dogs - One 7970, 1440p, Max Settings

Sleeping Dogs 1 GPU 2 GPU 3 GPU
AMD
NVIDIA  

Computation Benchmarks ASUS P9X79-E WS Conclusion
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  • mapesdhs - Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - link


    Makes perfect sense if you need to build something now. :D I've been talking to a movie
    guy who's about to construct something based on this E revision. Similar to mine but better
    GPUs, beginning with one 780Ti, expanding to 4 later. Only slight hitch is I've been trying
    to convince him to use a Corsair H110 for the CPU instead of a big HS, the latter making
    transport more difficult. Either way, it'll be a good AE system until he switches to a dual-socket
    24-core XEON setup next year.

    The only thing really missing from X79 (apart from a proper 8-core consumer chip option)
    is more Intel SATA3 ports which don't suffer from the perils one can encounter with Marvell
    ports. Both performance and reliability are better with the Intel ports, in some cases by a
    huge margin. People harp on about USB3, but a lot of pro users I know rarely use it and if
    they do need a USB link they're usually happy with USB2. Depends on the task though of
    course, I'm sure some would find it important.

    Ian.
  • almajnall - Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - link

    hi
  • dzezik - Monday, February 10, 2014 - link

    if You compare this funny mobo with professional supermicro e.g. X9SRL-F (7 PCIe slots for server use) or X9SRA for workstation it looks like a toy for kids. ASUS uses a lot of tricks but it cant overcome 40 lanes limitation from single CPU. motherboard is to complicated. 64GB of RAM is the limit? something is wrong with ASUS, Supermicro support 512GB. If You go for XEON chose Supermicro and Tyan
  • mazzy80 - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link

    Actually the SM boards look more like demo sample that a real board with so few surface Caps, Mosfet that this Board. :)
    The reality that they're not necessary to run the system at stock with the wide margin on Xeon about voltages.
    BTW, the 64GB limit is about UDIMM Vs RDIMM, only on the C600 series the RDIMM & UDIMM are supported, on X79 only UDIMM.

    P.S.
    SM rocks, you can't really go wrong with them for WS/Server rig.
  • Hale_Kyou - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    The 64 Gb limitation is in Intel Xeon and i7 CPUs, the same. For buffered memory. 500-700 Gb are supported with buffered memory on E5 Xeons only (E7 have hybrid controllers with external components). Buffered memory is MUCH slower than unbuffered due to penalties introduced by buffer and its latent logic. The same, inter-CPU RAM access introduces big penalties on multicore Xeon sustems. That's why sometimes (generally in HPC simulations) single core system with unbuffered RAM is preferred.
  • Hale_Kyou - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    there's a typo. Of course 64Gb limitation is for unbuffered RAM both in Xeon and i7. The limitation is removed on latest server-oriented Atoms.
  • EdB1 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link

    Hi djezik, although your post is fairly old, I had a look at the two board you mentioned, and they don't have the same PCI-E lanes expansion capabilites as the P9X79-E WS board, which has 72 PCI-E lines, due to 2 additional PLX chips, and can run at 16x x 4 slots at full speed or 2 x 16x and 5 x 8x, the two boards you mentioned do have greater mem capacity though, ie; 512GB ECC vs 64GB ECC or non ECC.

    So it really depends what you need this board to do. If you want to put 4 x 16X graphics cards in at once and don't need more than the 64GB ram limit, then this is the board to get, but if you do need more that the 64GB then the ASUS should not be considered.
  • Hale_Kyou - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Liars! x79 DOE NOT support "full turbo mode (4.0 GHz) no matter the loading"
    "One new feature called ASUS Ratio Boost is in the BIOS, which implements MultiCore Turbo for Xeon CPUs"
    Is a lie, according to ASUS itself. I don't know why did they trick people this dirty way. Maybe Intel pays them for spreading weird rumors. But ASUS says that turbo bins can not be reconfigured on their boards for XEON CPUs!
  • Hale_Kyou - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    P.S. Of course it works on i7, that's why they lied about Xeon, but "proofed" with screenshots only with i7X running "all core full turbo".
  • ReneGQ - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link

    I recently purchased an Asus Motherboard and the problems started from day 1. The drivers update never works, the same for AI Suite III (there´s a lot of updates for this model in Asus webpage). After 2 months I still can´t install BitDefender cause a clock watchdog error.
    Asus technical support is the worst, mails comes and goes with no solution.
    I will not recommend this brand to anyone. The brand has a very good Marketing but the product and the service are very disappointment.

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