ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion and X79 Professional Review: From a Gamer to Gamers
by Ian Cutress on February 9, 2013 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- ASRock
- Fatal1ty
- X79
Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here, we refer to it now as MCT) on their motherboards. This does several things – better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal), at the expense of heat and temperature, but also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, memory subtimings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk which is clearly visible, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the purchase.
For this review, neither the Champion nor the Professional implement any form of MCT, meaning the Turbo ratios that Intel intended based on load are applied on the motherboard.
3D Movement Algorithm Test
The algorithms in 3DPM employ both uniform random number generation or normal distribution random number generation, and vary in various amounts of trigonometric operations, conditional statements, generation and rejection, fused operations, etc. The benchmark runs through six algorithms for a specified number of particles and steps, and calculates the speed of each algorithm, then sums them all for a final score. This is an example of a real world situation that a computational scientist may find themselves in, rather than a pure synthetic benchmark. The benchmark is also parallel between particles simulated, and we test the single thread performance as well as the multi-threaded performance.
Even though MCT is not a factor in single thread benchmarks, the X79 Fatal1ty boards are both behind their ROG counterparts by the smallest of margins.
When dealing with 12 threads, the effect of not having MCT is obvious to see, with the Professional almost 10% behind the Rampage IV Extreme.
WinRAR x64 3.93 - link
With 64-bit WinRAR, we compress the set of files used in the USB speed tests. WinRAR x64 3.93 attempts to use multithreading when possible, and provides as a good test for when a system has variable threaded load. If a system has multiple speeds to invoke at different loading, the switching between those speeds will determine how well the system will do.
As WinRAR is a variable thread workload, any board with MCT is going to benefit by not having to deal with changes in core speeds. The ROG boards were also able to implement our normal memory testing speeds (2400 9-11-11) which the ASRock Fatal1ty boards were not (2133 10-12-12) which is also likely to have had an effect.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.2 - link
FastStone Image Viewer is a free piece of software I have been using for quite a few years now. It allows quick viewing of flat images, as well as resizing, changing color depth, adding simple text or simple filters. It also has a bulk image conversion tool, which we use here. The software currently operates only in single-thread mode, which should change in later versions of the software. For this test, we convert a series of 170 files, of various resolutions, dimensions and types (of a total size of 163MB), all to the .gif format of 640x480 dimensions.
The single threaded nature of FastStone does not tend to show up any discrepancies, and here we see both ASRock boards performing similarly to the ROG boards.
Xilisoft Video Converter
With XVC, users can convert any type of normal video to any compatible format for smartphones, tablets and other devices. By default, it uses all available threads on the system, and in the presence of appropriate graphics cards, can utilize CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs as well as AMD APP for AMD GPUs. For this test, we use a set of 32 HD videos, each lasting 30 seconds, and convert them from 1080p to an iPod H.264 video format using just the CPU. The time taken to convert these videos gives us our result.
As XVC is a full on multithreaded benchmark, the X79 Fatal1ty boards are both behind any ASUS ROG offering by ~10%.
x264 HD Benchmark
The x264 HD Benchmark uses a common HD encoding tool to process an HD MPEG2 source at 1280x720 at 3963 Kbps. This test represents a standardized result which can be compared across other reviews, and is dependant on both CPU power and memory speed. The benchmark performs a 2-pass encode, and the results shown are the average of each pass performed four times.
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dgz - Monday, February 11, 2013 - link
Thresh is making big bucks in other areas. Their latest company provides quality product for big business.KoolAidMan1 - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
Warcraft 3 was bigger than Quake 3 ever was, and this is before we eve get into the massive DOTA scene. DOTA in China right now is bigger than Brood War, SC2, CS 1.6, and League Of Legends combined, and any of those individual games dwarf Quake 3 in popularity.Grubby hasn't won anything in Starcraft 2 so far, but he's been placing higher with almost every new tournament he competes in and he is a very well liked and respected player. His name on a product would easily help to sell it.
dgz - Monday, February 11, 2013 - link
While WC3 was indeed big, it was all dota after 2004-2005. You guys know it's true.Quake 3 community never consisted millions of players but it remained the ultimate duel shooter for how many years now? How many people drive F1 again?
dawp - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
[qouote]The Fatal1ty branded boards were ‘designed by Abit, but game-tested and approved by Fatal1ty’ up until socket 775 and FM2.[/quote]don't you mean AM2 there since FM2 wasn't around when Abit was?
TeXWiller - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
and ECC support. One might be able to forge workstations out of these.yzkbug - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
Is this you, Johnathan 'Fatal1ty" Wendel?JeBarr - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
Like many high end gaming boards, these two cram on the extra features that almost no gamer would ever use.Does anyone think that Johnny Wendel would use even half of the USB 3.0 and Sata III 6.0GB/s ports?
I don't.
Would even the most competitive gamer and power-user require such an amount of extra features for their at-home system?
Probably not.
I can see the need for extra PCIe x16 slots, for obvious reasons.....but legacy PCI slots on the Pro model is just ridiculous. Give me an extra PCIe 2.0 x1 or x4 slot instead. Get with the times, geez.
And how about these high end gaming boards with creative audio chip on-board? Right, because everyone knows it's such a great idea to have an audio amplifier mixed in with all the traces. I mean, seriously, just get rid of the extra unused PCI slots and put PCIe slots instead so I can add my own sound card....geez.
Tech-Curious - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
Yeah, I would expect a motherboard aimed particularly at gamers to be stripped down on features, with extremely high-quality components supplying the features that are important.The review sorta makes that very point, when it compares the Fatal1ty mobos to their Asus analogues -- quality over quantity of features.
That said, motherboards in general seem to be over-featured, and there is a segment of the market that would (understandably) balk at paying high-premium prices for a motherboard without all possible bells and whistles. But perhaps those two points only tend to suggest that motherboards are a bad fit for a pro-racer-style marketing campaign: motherboards don't tend to contribute all that much to the overall performance of a computer system, beyond a relatively low threshold of quality. Whatever difference motherboards do make tends to be overwhelmed by the performance attributes of other components, and so motherboard manufacturers feel compelled to add features to motherboards to differentiate their products from their competitors'.
Don't get me wrong: the motherboards reviewed in this article are high-end, performance-oriented parts, but they fit that description in large part because they use a socket-2011 chipset (and therefore they must be paired with a top-of-the-line CPU). That in itself is a bit of a head scratcher, IMO, because there's no compelling evidence to suggest that the LGA-2011 CPUs are noticeably better than the i7 3770k in a gaming context. Where the 2011 platform shines is in heavy-duty high-threaded workloads.
The long and the short of it is that ASRock's branding an LGA 2011 motherboard around a pro gamer is a little like a car company branding a luxury sedan around Jeff Gordon.
dgz - Monday, February 11, 2013 - link
Who the hell is this Jeff Gordon guy? Never heard of him. Quite a few F1 and rally guys are used to promote regular cars.JlHADJOE - Monday, February 11, 2013 - link
Which regular cars? Almost every car I know that has a racing driver's name on it has been pretty sporty.Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce Niki Lauda
Ford Mustang McLaren
Caterham JPE (Jonathan Palmer Edition)
Acura/Honda NSX Zanardi Edition
McLaren Mercedes SLR Stirling Moss
Subaru Imprezas in Colin McRae, Richard Burns and Peter Solberg editions
Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution 6.5 Tommi Makinen Edition