The ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate Motherboard Review: Aquantia 10GbE on Ryzen
by Gavin Bonshor on August 2, 2018 9:00 AM ESTCPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We put the memory settings at the CPU manufacturers suggested frequency, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v1.0.2: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container: a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short. We also take the third video and transcode it to HEVC. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.4: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2017. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test v2.1: 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. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here. We are using the latest version of 3DPM, which has a significant number of tweaks over the original version to avoid issues with cache management and speeding up some of the algorithms.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
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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crotach - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
I wonder why B350 and X370 perform so much better than the new chipset, the differences are quite substantial. Even power draw is lower, and the X370 chipset draws more power than X470!It must be all those christmas lights on the board :)
virpuain@gmail.com - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
A beautiful piece of hardware with the worst bios support. AsRock bios support is garbage, two months ago that board was in really bad shape because of that, the X370 Taichi they have yet to released a decent bios supporting 12 nm CPUs, and there are still a crapload of issues with 14 nm cpus with that bios.Just check asrock own forums and the Taichi thread on OCN.
WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
My goodness. Im not sure if this comment section is all trolls or just self hating types, but wow is it annoying to read you girls cry about typos or grammar mistakes.PeachNCream - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
It's annoying to read someone call people girls as if referring to us as female is an insult while at the same time not knowing our genders.WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
ExactlyTchamber - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
You mention that none of these boards are optimized for DPC latency, yet they best most every Intel board you've listed. What kind of latency is noticeable? The last time I noticed it was in my OLD Core 2 Quad laptop.https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph12706/dpc...
Wolfclaw - Saturday, August 4, 2018 - link
Drop the wifi and put in a couple oi USB2's for older stuff and a thunderbolt.atomicparticle - Wednesday, August 8, 2018 - link
Their hardware might be good but their bios team is just really B A D.FIY they can't even have a fix the basics like a proper "SAVE PROFILE" function that can actually save things on their now more than one year old X370 Taichi. The same board that still uses hexadecimal numbers for memory timings. The same board that doesn't have a functional clockgenerator. The same board have memory badwidth losses up to 20% if manual overclocking is in use.
I understand every company is limited on resources but AsRock is just REALLY BAD at supporting their boards.
What is worth a great motherboard with a crap bios ? AVOID ASROCK
http://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=8668&a...
https://www.overclock.net/forum/27481658-post3765....
Dug - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link
And the things you listed should be tested under a motherboard review.atomicparticle - Thursday, August 16, 2018 - link
I was flaming them with a copypasta in their products so they would hear us because they have been ignoring us for months. Now they seem to be fixing their BIOS so there has been some progress with their bios support, if they keep it Ill stop flaming and even praise them in the future.