ASRock Rack C2750D4I Review: A Storage Motherboard with Management
by Ian Cutress on April 29, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Storage
- Atom
- ASRock
- Silvermont
- Enterprise
- server
- Avoton
Scientific and Synthetic Benchmarks
2D to 3D Rendering –Agisoft PhotoScan v1.0: link
Agisoft Photoscan creates 3D models from 2D images, a process which is very computationally expensive. The algorithm is split into four distinct phases, and different phases of the model reconstruction require either fast memory, fast IPC, more cores, or even OpenCL compute devices to hand. Agisoft supplied us with a special version of the software to script the process, where we take 50 images of a stately home and convert it into a medium quality model. This benchmark typically takes around 15-20 minutes on a high end PC on the CPU alone, with GPUs reducing the time.
Console Emulation –Dolphin Benchmark: link
At the start of 2014 I was emailed with a link to a new emulation benchmark based on the Dolphin Emulator. The issue with emulators tends to be two-fold: game licensing and raw CPU power required for the emulation. As a result, many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant post to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53; meaning that anything above this is faster than an actual Wii for processing Wii code, albeit emulated.
Emulation is clearly not a target for Avoton.
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 wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
As the 3DPM test abuses the ability for a CPU to dispatch threads and FP calculations, Intel have historically been good here. The CPU battles with AMD in single threaded, but the 8 cores allows software to exploit parallelism in this manner.
Encryption –TrueCrypt v0.7.1a: link
TrueCrypt is an off the shelf open source encryption tool for files and folders. For our test we run the benchmark mode using a 1GB buffer and take the mean result from AES encryption.
For AES software encryption, the Avoton platform enjoys the 8 cores but suffers from a lack of hardware acceleration, putting it in the region of the AMD CPUs.
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.
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bernstein - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
not when you want to run it next to your tv in a 100m2 appartment :)ZeDestructor - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
I have a 48-port switch in my bdroom.. I fail to see your point :PIn your place, I'd run it under the TV, straight off the floor, with some quiet fans... 120mm fans are always quiet.
Guspaz - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
100 square metres is a pretty huge apartment, but the idea behind a storage server isn't to put it next to your TV or projector anyhow. I'm moving from a 34sqm apartment to a 65 sqm apartment, and I've got a 15-drive (18 drive if you include the boot/cache SSDs) ZFS file server for all my media. But it's a headless system, and even though it's pretty quiet (I've used nothing but low-power drives), it doesn't need to be anywhere near the home theatre setup. It's going to go in a closet somewhere. The only connection it needs to my home theatre is not an HDMI cable, but a Cat6 cable :)Of course, I don't have a dedicated HTPC either; my main desktop (an SFF system) will be in the same room as my home theatre, connected to my HDMI matrix switch. It can access files on the giant file server in the closet, while taking up very little space itself. If for some reason my desktop couldn't be near my home theatre, I'd probably just buy an NUC-like system for that.
bernstein - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
true it doesn't need to be near the tv... but at least my appartment doesn't have a closet. so its either bath, kitchen, living room or one of the sleeping rooms. or the cellar... 5 floors down. installing network cabling there is north of $5000... and wlan through multiple concrete thats just not going to do it.bernstein - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
yeah wouldn't have anything else than zfsextide - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
You can always buy reverse breakout SFF-8087 cableshasseb64 - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
10W less in IDLE compared to a standard/high performance Z87 MB and Haswell top CPU?I'll pass!
jwcalla - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Is there a Z87 MB that supports ECC ram?bernstein - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
noMarquis - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
The article states there are 4 fan headers, but there are actually 6. The aforementioned four next to the CPU socket and two more in the corner near the cluster of SATA ports that are all-white.