It's An RGB Disco: The GIGABYTE X299 Gaming 7 Pro Motherboard, Reviewed
by Joe Shields on January 26, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gaming
- Intel
- Gigabyte
- AORUS
- RGB
- X299
- Basin Falls
- Skylake-X
- Gaming 7 Pro
Benchmark Overview
For our testing, depending on the product, we attempt to tailor the presentation of our global benchmark suite down into what users who would buy this hardware might actually want to run. For CPUs, our full test suite is typically used to gather data and all the results are placed into Bench, our benchmark database for users that want to look at non-typical benchmarks or legacy data. For motherboards, we run our short form CPU tests, the gaming tests with half the GPUs of our processor suite, and our system benchmark tests which focus on non-typical and non-obvious performance metrics that are the focal point for specific groups of users.
The benchmarks fall into several areas:
Short Form CPU
Our short form testing script uses a straight run through of a mixture of known apps or workloads and requires about four hours. These are typically the CPU tests we run in our motherboard suite, to identify any performance anomalies.
| CPU Short Form Benchmarks | |
| Three Dimensional Particle Movement v2.1 (3DPM) | 3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, derived from my academic research years looking at particle movement parallelism. The coding for this tool was rough, but emulates the real world in being non-CompSci trained code for a scientific endeavor. The code is unoptimized, but the test uses OpenMP to move particles around a field using one of six 3D movement algorithms in turn, each of which is found in the academic literature. |
| The second version of this benchmark is similar to the first, however it has been re-written in VS2012 with one major difference: the code has been written to address the issue of false sharing. If data required by multiple threads, say four, is in the same cache line, the software cannot read the cache line once and split the data to each thread - instead it will read four times in a serial fashion. The new software splits the data to new cache lines so reads can be parallelized and stalls minimized. | |
| WinRAR 5.4 | WinRAR is a compression based software to reduce file size at the expense of CPU cycles. We use the version that has been a stable part of our benchmark database through 2015, and run the default settings on a 1.52GB directory containing over 2800 files representing a small website with around thirty half-minute videos. We take the average of several runs in this instance. |
| POV-Ray 3.7.1 b4 | POV-Ray is a common ray-tracing tool used to generate realistic looking scenes. We've used POV-Ray in its various guises over the years as a good benchmark for performance, as well as a tool on the march to ray-tracing limited immersive environments. We use the built-in multi threaded benchmark. |
| HandBrake v1.0.2 | HandBrake is a freeware video conversion tool. We use the tool in to process two different videos into x264 in an MP4 container - first a 'low quality' two-hour video at 640x388 resolution to x264, then a 'high quality' ten-minute video at 4320x3840, and finally the second video again but into HEVC. The low-quality video scales at lower performance hardware, whereas the buffers required for high-quality tests can stretch even the biggest processors. At current, this is a CPU only test. |
| 7-Zip 9.2 | 7-Zip is a freeware compression/decompression tool that is widely deployed across the world. We run the included benchmark tool using a 50MB library and take the average of a set of fixed-time results. |
| DigiCortex v1.20 | The newest benchmark in our suite is DigiCortex, a simulation of biologically plausible neural network circuits, and simulates activity of neurons and synapses. DigiCortex relies heavily on a mix of DRAM speed and computational throughput, indicating that systems which apply memory profiles properly should benefit and those that play fast and loose with overclocking settings might get some extra speed up. |
System Benchmarks
Our system benchmarks are designed to probe motherboard controller performance, particularly any additional USB controllers or the audio controller. As general platform tests we have DPC Latency measurements and system boot time, which can be difficult to optimize for on the board design and manufacturing level.
| System Benchmarks | |
| Power Consumption | One of the primary differences between different motherboads is power consumption. Aside from the base defaults that every motherboard needs, things like power delivery, controller choice, routing and firmware can all contribute to how much power a system can draw. This increases for features such as PLX chips and multi-gigabit ethernet. |
| Non-UEFI POST Time | The POST sequence of the motherboard becomes before loading the OS, and involves pre-testing of onboard controllers, the CPU, the DRAM and everything else to ensure base stability. The number of controllers, as well as firmware optimizations, affect the POST time a lot. We test the BIOS defaults as well as attempt a stripped POST. |
| Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.2.5 | Testing onboard audio is difficult, especially with the numerous amount of post-processing packages now being bundled with hardware. Nonetheless, manufacturers put time and effort into offering a 'cleaner' sound that is loud and of a high quality. RMAA, with version 6.2.5 (newer versions have issues), under the right settings can be used to test the signal-to-noise ratio, signal crossover, and harmonic distortion with noise. |
| USB Backup | USB ports can come from a variety of sources: chipsets, controllers or hubs. More often than not, the design of the traces can lead to direct impacts on USB performance as well as firmware level choices relating to signal integrity on the motherboard. |
| DPC Latency | Another element is deferred procedure call latency, or the ability to handle interrupt servicing. Depending on the motherboard firmware and controller selection, some motherboards handle these interrupts quicker than others. A poor result could lead to delays in performance, or for example with audio, a delayed request can manifest in distinct audible pauses, pops or clicks. |
Gaming
Our gaming benchmarks are designed to show any differences in performance when playing games.
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29 Comments
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dave_the_nerd - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
What the actual hell?The worst thing about my hobbies are, apparently, the other people who enjoy them.
Lord of the Bored - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - link
Yup, that about sums it up.cbm80 - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
Disco Stu will overclock you!FreckledTrout - Sunday, January 28, 2018 - link
Why don't we don't see RGB used for actual useful features like color coding with light the back ports like the audio ports etc?Beaver M. - Sunday, January 28, 2018 - link
Or LEDs at the back of the Monitor, changing colors according to the picture displayed.Oh wait, that already exists and is heavily copyrighted, so that only one manufacturer can use it and doesnt want it to take foot in gaming.
Gunbuster - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
Or even bother to sell a TV in the united states. Thanks Philips...Gunbuster - Sunday, January 28, 2018 - link
Aorus bro eagle is still not animated in LED lifting a dumbell...BenJeremy - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
Just say no to X299's VROC scam. Intel has made a mess of its support for M.2 NVMe RAID-0 arrays, and boards built on this chipset are a hot mess. Even with the "proper" VROC key (assuming you can get one), you'll find that Intel LIED about supporting non-Intel NVMe storage for bootable RAID arrays.It pains me to say that... I've been an Intel fan for many, many years and was looking forward to seeing their RAID solution optimized for NVMe, but motherboard manufaturers rushed out motherboards last year that linked M.2 slots to DMI PCI-e lanes (chipset, not direct to CPU), and hampered the whole implementation with crappy BIOS software. The Asus Hyper-X M.2 card, that works well with non-Asus AMD-based motherboards fails to work on these Gigabyte motherboards, too...
Maybe you all don't care about getting 20GB/sec throughput on your bootable storage, but if Intel is mucking up and outright lying about this, how confident can you be about the rest of their features?
wolfman3k5 - Thursday, April 26, 2018 - link
I don't know exactly how GIGABYTE releases motherboards, because it seems that they keep every model for a very short time in production. While I can't find the X299 Designare EX or the Aorus Gaming 7 Pro anywhere in stock, I have found the GIGABYTE X299 Aorus Gaming 9 for sale on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/173287187006 - and the price seems to be pretty good.