ASRock Rack C2750D4I Review: A Storage Motherboard with Management
by Ian Cutress on April 29, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Storage
- Atom
- ASRock
- Silvermont
- Enterprise
- server
- Avoton
Scientific and Synthetic Benchmarks
2D to 3D Rendering –Agisoft PhotoScan v1.0: link
Agisoft Photoscan creates 3D models from 2D images, a process which is very computationally expensive. The algorithm is split into four distinct phases, and different phases of the model reconstruction require either fast memory, fast IPC, more cores, or even OpenCL compute devices to hand. Agisoft supplied us with a special version of the software to script the process, where we take 50 images of a stately home and convert it into a medium quality model. This benchmark typically takes around 15-20 minutes on a high end PC on the CPU alone, with GPUs reducing the time.
Console Emulation –Dolphin Benchmark: link
At the start of 2014 I was emailed with a link to a new emulation benchmark based on the Dolphin Emulator. The issue with emulators tends to be two-fold: game licensing and raw CPU power required for the emulation. As a result, many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant post to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53; meaning that anything above this is faster than an actual Wii for processing Wii code, albeit emulated.
Emulation is clearly not a target for Avoton.
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 wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
As the 3DPM test abuses the ability for a CPU to dispatch threads and FP calculations, Intel have historically been good here. The CPU battles with AMD in single threaded, but the 8 cores allows software to exploit parallelism in this manner.
Encryption –TrueCrypt v0.7.1a: link
TrueCrypt is an off the shelf open source encryption tool for files and folders. For our test we run the benchmark mode using a 1GB buffer and take the mean result from AES encryption.
For AES software encryption, the Avoton platform enjoys the 8 cores but suffers from a lack of hardware acceleration, putting it in the region of the AMD CPUs.
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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samsp99 - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Agreed on the comments that this is a strange configuration of hardware. Would it have been better to incorporate either 3 4 Channel SAS controllers, or one controller and an SAS expander so you don't need to have 12 cables for the drives. It would then allow for better configurability for RAID.A USB3 header on the MB would be useful either with a separate hub, or for use with a flash drive for OS installation or as a boot drive.
lagozit - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Pardon my ignorance, but what is "cold storage"?DuckieHo - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
Write once, read few.OCedHrt - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
Since I just got my hands on this board, I do want to point out a discrepancy.The C2750 has very different BIOS options than the screenshots here from the C2550 (much less, in fact).
I'm also wondering if you would be able to test a Sil3132 card in the PCI-E slot. I can't get the board to detect it.
iwod - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
$400 for a MB like this.......Calista - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
Well, the CPU is almost $200 itself, another $200 for a small run design doesn't seem unreasonable.hallary - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
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At $400 it's priced out of the core HTPC market; it's clearly intended as an entry level large storage server. As pointed out below, the spaghetti explosion from wiring a dozen drives with individual cables makes it unsuitable for most enterprise use (or prosumers who know better). http://sn.im/28v3ntgSuperSpy00bob - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
No ECC support?jwcalla - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
Of course it has ECC support. It'd be useless without it.