ASRock Rack B550D4-4L Motherboard Review: B550 Goes Professional with BMC
by Gavin Bonshor on May 20, 2021 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.
For B550 we are running using Windows 10 64-bit with the 1909 update.
Rendering - Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite - link
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing - 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 1-2 minutes on high-end platforms.
Compression – WinRAR 5.60b3: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. 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.
Synthetic – 7-Zip v1805: link
Out of our compression/decompression tool tests, 7-zip is the most requested and comes with a built-in benchmark. For our test suite, we’ve pulled the latest version of the software and we run the benchmark from the command line, reporting the compression, decompression, and a combined score.
It is noted in this benchmark that the latest multi-die processors have very bi-modal performance between compression and decompression, performing well in one and badly in the other. There are also discussions around how the Windows Scheduler is implementing every thread. As we get more results, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
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 win 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.
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im.thatoneguy - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
Please stop putting 10g ports one servers.They're always 10-BaseT which is useless to me. They take up pcie lanes. And 25gb/40gb/100gb is imminently supplanting 10gb.
It's too late for 10g especially baseT
fmyhr - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
Heh. I agree with you about 10-BaseT, SFP+ would be preferable if 10GbE *needs* to be present. I don't have $ or power budget for 25gb/40gb/100gb network... but understand those are requirements for some. I'm curious how your ideal board would allocate its limited PCIe lanes among PCIe slots, M.2 slots, OcuLink,...?bananaforscale - Saturday, May 22, 2021 - link
10GBase-T uses the same cabling as 1000Base-T, assuming the network was built with any future proofing so you can basically just plug it in. 25GBase-T probably won't happen. 'sides, YOU are not the market. What's useless to you is probably useful for someone. Also besides, you can disable those integrated NICs.mode_13h - Saturday, May 22, 2021 - link
> 10GBase-T uses the same cabling as 1000Base-T,> assuming the network was built with any future proofing
Depends on when. It might've been built with Cat 6, rather than Cat 6A. And even that has shorter length limitations and requires greater power expenditure than we're used to with Gigabit.
BTW, there's no such standard as Cat 6e. If you see someone selling cable as Cat 6e, treat it as plain Cat 6, but with a bit more suspicion.
Samus - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
I think 2x2.5G would be more appropriate for the target market of this board. Anybody considering 10Gbe is likely on the verge of adopting 25/40/100G anyway, in which case the PCIe slot will be utilized.The other head scratcher is why the M2 slot isn’t PCIe 4.0 - the allocation of PCIe lanes to ports on this board is very strange.
fmyhr - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
Do you have personal experience running 2.5GbE? I've seen reports of problems using both Intel and Realtek chipsets. Whereas 10GbE is very mature and well-supported. Upside of being "obsolete" :-)This board runs the M.2 slot from the B550 chipset, which limits its speed to PCIe 3.0. The upside of this choice is an extra PCIe 4.0 x4 slot from the CPU. Into which you could install an M.2 carrier board if you need your SSD on PCIe 4.0. Personally I'd try bifurcating the PCIe 4.0 x16 slot and running a quad M.2 card there, and whatever other PCIe card in the x4 slot.
lightningz71 - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
Does this board even support 4way bifurcation of the PCIe x16 slot?Samus - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link
The B550 can't bifurcate the x4 slot, but it apparently can the x16 slot. In the case of some boards with multiple PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 connectors, they start by cutting the x16 slot bandwidth, then after a third M.2 drive is installed they either totally disable the x4 slot or run the x16 slot at x4, configurable in the BIOS (in the case of the Gigabyte B550 Aurus Master)Samus - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link
Personally no I'm not running any 2.5G stuff, and based on what you are stating, maybe that's why there hasn't been adoption. I agree going with a mature solution but 2.5G isn't exactly new and by now you'd think the bugs are worked out. 2.5G is, after all, based on a lower handshake of 10Gbe, and at long distances 10Gbe actually negotiates at 2.5G, and I have installed 2.5G cards in the field that connect to 10Gbe ports at 2.5G. It's the damn SFP adapters that are all proprietary with their individual standards so you just need to make those up with whatever chipset the NIC you are connecting has.Regarding NVMe on B550, I'm not sure what you are getting at. There have been B550 boards on the market for over a year that have not one, not two, but three native PCIe4 NVMe M.2 slots direct from the chipset. Obviously having many M.2 slots impedes on other PCIe x4\x8\x16 slot bandwidth because the consumer Ryzen's don't offer many lanes. But that doesn't mean this board should leave support out entirely as the M.2 could just cut into the x4 or x16 slot bandwidth.
mode_13h - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link
> Do you have personal experience running 2.5GbE?Well, the main benefit is cable length and compatibility. If the speed is fast enough for you, then it seems an attractive option for those with legacy cabling.