The ASRock X399 Professional Gaming Motherboard Review: 10G For All
by E. Fylladitakis on July 5, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- AMD
- Gigabyte
- ASRock
- Asus
- 10GBase-T
- ThreadRipper
- X399
ASRock X399 Professional Gaming Software
ASRock's DVD comes with a very basic automated installer software. The installer has five tabs, the first of which contains all of the drivers and software for this motherboard's subsystems, plus Google’s Chrome Browser and Toolbar (even though the fifth tab is also dedicated to them). The second tab, the "utilities" tab, includes the software that are not necessary for the proper operation of the motherboard, which are the ASRock RGB LED software and the Sound Blaster Cinema 3 utility. Manuals and guides can be found under the Information tab and, finally, the company’s contact information is all that can be seen under the Contact tab.
The ASRock RGB LED software is simple but very clean and easy to use. All of the options are gathered into a single page, where the user can simply choose a color and a visual effect and apply it to any of the motherboard's three LED zones. LED lighting can also be disabled from here. Unfortunately, there are no options to tie different lighting mode profiles to applications/games.
ASRock’s F-Stream utility is a software package that allows almost full control of the motherboard’s BIOS options via the OS. In its “OC Tweaker” tab we found most of the settings that are accessible via the BIOS screen, allowing for casual overclockers to experiment with minimal risk, as the settings reset when the system restarts. It is also handy for people who do not want a permanent overclock forced via the BIOS but prefer to boot with stock settings and force an overclock whenever they want or after the OS has booted. The F-Stream software contains the "FAN-Tastic" utility as well, which allows for the graphical programming of fan cooling profiles.
Finally, the Sound Blaster Cinema 3 application offers very limited extra audio control for audiophiles and HTPC enthusiasts. Technically, it can only control the SBX Surround technology setting that enhances the audio surround. It has four preprogrammed profiles, music, film, game, and voice, plus a custom profile that allows the user to program SBX surround as he/she sees fit. Regardless of it including virtually only one tweakable option, the SBX Surround is rather effective, especially in the case of limiting 2.0 and 2.1 speaker configurations. Basic speaker and headphone configuration options are also present, with pre-programmed profiles for Sound BlasterX H3/H5/H7 headphones.
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bug77 - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
"However, with a price tag of $440, the X399 Professional Gaming also is one of the most expensive Ryzen Threadripper motherboards available."And yet, the title of the article says it's "for all".
Also, Threadripper is a rather poor choice for gaming. Even if you're streaming, you don't need that many cores. Threadripper is really good is you massively edit photo or edit video or do 3D rendering and few other specialized things. But not for much else.
This is not a criticism, with today's CPU one has to carefully weigh whether they need more cores or faster cores, depending on their usage patterns. There no universal solution like there was back in the single-core CPUs day. (And even then, if you didn't need FPU performance, a much cheaper AMD CPU could have been the better pick.)
Myrandex - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
Eh the original single core Athlon 64 CPUs even had pretty banging FPU performance back in the day too.bug77 - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
True, but the original K6 didn't ;)DanNeely - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
It's "10G For All", the for all is attached to the 10G ethernet support, meaning it's a thread-ripper board with 10G for both gaming and work station use. It's more expensive than general use boards of either category because the 10G controller is still seriously expensive. If you don't need 10G ethernet, it's probably not the board you want because of the price premium attached for it.bug77 - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
So... it's not for all.eek2121 - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
I would have to disagree there. Windows has hundreds of thousands of processes running in the background and when Threadripper is set up properly it performs great with gaming. Even if you do able 8 of the cores you can easily beat out the 1800X from an IPC perspective thanks to lower cache latencies (Threadripper has similar cache latencies to the 2700X). The higher XFR boost (4200hz), slightly better IPC, quad channel memory, and more cores means a better gaming experience than the 1800X...if you can afford it.bug77 - Friday, July 6, 2018 - link
I didn't say it performs poorly. But perf/$ isn't the best for many workflows.Marlin1975 - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
It says Creative SoundBlaster on the cover yet the description says Onboard Audio Realtek ALC1220A?This just some marketing/software so it makes it seem nicer?
tmediaphotography - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
"It supports the Sound Blaster Cinema 3 software"Realtek hardware, but anyone who is perversely attached the Creative Labs software can feel free to install and use the Cinema 3 software.
DanNeely - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
Sound blaster switched from custom hardware to just being a custom driver for other audio hardware a few years ago.