The ASRock X399 Phantom Gaming 6 Motherboard Review: $250 Sixteen Core Stunner

Gaming Performance

Due to the change of graphics card on the X399 test bench from an AMD RX 570 to a slightly more powerful NVIDIA GTX 980, for game testing, we're comparing it to our AM4 chipset boards. The Ryzen 7 1700 and Ryzen Threadripper 2950X share the similar Zen core architecture ported over to 12 nm which does perform similarly in gaming scenarios. The Ryzen Threadripper 2950X was tested in our game benchmark suite with both SMT enabled and disabled as in previous testing, it has shown that SMT can actually hinder in-game performance due to the lack of high thread optimization within certain games.

CHECK OVER - The only anomaly came in our Total War: WARHAMMER benchmark testing with the 1950X performing considerably worse than the Ryzen 1700. Every other test provided the expected results.

For 2019, we are running an updated version of our test suite, including OS and CPU cooler. This has some effect on our results.

For this review, we had to test with a 2950X as the 1950X we normally use with X399 had to be returned. This has some effect on benchmark data, however it is still rated to the same 180W TDP as the 1950X.

Ashes of the Singularity

Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of DirectX12s features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.

Rise Of The Tomb Raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game that features similar gameplay found in 2013's Tomb Raider. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.

One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 3 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.

Thief

Thief has been a long-standing title in PC gamers hearts since the introduction of the very first iteration which was released back in 1998 (Thief: The Dark Project). Thief as it is simply known rebooted the long-standing series and renowned publisher Square Enix took over the task from where Eidos Interactive left off back in 2004. The game itself utilises the fluid Unreal Engine 3 engine and is known for optimised and improved destructible environments, large crowd simulation and soft body dynamics.