ASRock X99 WS-E/10G Motherboard Review: Dual 10GBase-T for Prosumers
by Ian Cutress on December 15, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- IT Computing
- Intel
- ASRock
- Enterprise
- X99
- 10GBase-T
System Performance
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system while in a single MSI GTX 770 Lightning GPU configuration with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers. These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.
Power consumption all around was very high for the X99 WS-E/10G, with a long idle to load delta of 157W for the CPU; most other motherboards hover between 130 and 140W, so this compounds the peak power issue.
Windows 7 POST Time
Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we look at the POST Boot Time using a stopwatch. This is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows 7 starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.)
Despite having the extra X540-BT2 controller, POST time on the board was within the expected range.
Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.2.5
Rightmark:AA indicates how well the sound system is built and isolated from electrical interference (either internally or externally). For this test we connect the Line Out to the Line In using a short six inch 3.5mm to 3.5mm high-quality jack, turn the OS speaker volume to 100%, and run the Rightmark default test suite at 192 kHz, 24-bit. The OS is tuned to 192 kHz/24-bit input and output, and the Line-In volume is adjusted until we have the best RMAA value in the mini-pretest. We look specifically at the Dynamic Range of the audio codec used on board, as well as the Total Harmonic Distortion + Noise.
Dynamic Range of X99 WS-E/10G
While our Dynamic Range results were reasonable, the THD+N results were a lot lower than expected.
USB Backup
For this benchmark, we transfer a set size of files from the SSD to the USB drive using DiskBench, which monitors the time taken to transfer. The files transferred are a 1.52 GB set of 2867 files across 320 folders – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second HD videos. In an update to pre-Z87 testing, we also run MaxCPU to load up one of the threads during the test which improves general performance up to 15% by causing all the internal pathways to run at full speed.
Both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 speeds were on the high end in comparison to the other X99 motherboards tested.
DPC Latency
Deferred Procedure Call latency is a way in which Windows handles interrupt servicing. In order to wait for a processor to acknowledge the request, the system will queue all interrupt requests by priority. Critical interrupts will be handled as soon as possible, whereas lesser priority requests such as audio will be further down the line. If the audio device requires data, it will have to wait until the request is processed before the buffer is filled.
If the device drivers of higher priority components in a system are poorly implemented, this can cause delays in request scheduling and process time. This can lead to an empty audio buffer and characteristic audible pauses, pops and clicks. The DPC latency checker measures how much time is taken processing DPCs from driver invocation. The lower the value will result in better audio transfer at smaller buffer sizes. Results are measured in microseconds.
DPC results were rather high with the X540-BT2 enabled in the BIOS, showing 772 microseconds. Initially it was thought this was due to the GPU attached, but on disabling the 10G ports it reduced down to 86 microseconds which is more manageable. Unfortunately the main reason for getting this motherboard would be the 10G ports, so it would seem some optimization is needed.
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gsvelto - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Where I worked we had extensive 10G SFP+ deployments with ping latency measured in single-digit µs. The latency numbers you gave are for pure-throughput oriented, low CPU overhead transfers and are obviously unacceptable if your applications are latency sensitive. Obtaining those numbers usually requires tweaking your power-scaling/idle governors as well as kernel offloads. The benefits you get are very significant on a number of loads (e.g. lots of small file over NFS for example) and 10GBase-T can be a lot slower on those workloads. But as I mentioned in my previous post 10GBase-T is not only slower, it's also more expensive, more power hungry and has a minimum physical transfer size of 400 bytes. So if you're load is composed of small packets and you don't have the luxury of aggregating them (because latency matters) then your maximum achievable bandwidth is greatly diminished.shodanshok - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Sure, packet size play a far bigger role for 10GBase-T then optical (or even copper) SFP+ links.Anyway, the pings tried before were for relatively small IP packets (physical size = 84 bytes), which are way lower then typical packet size.
For message-passing workloads SFP+ is surely a better fit, but for MPI it is generally better to use more latency-oriented protocol stacks (if I don't go wrong, Infiniband use a lightweight protocol stack for this very reason).
Regards.
T2k - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
Nonsense. CAT6a or even CAT6 would work just fine.Daniel Egger - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
You're missing the point. Sure Cat.6a would be sufficient (it's hard to find Cat.7 sockets anyway but the cabling used nowadays is mostly Cat.7 specced, not Cat.6a) but the problem is to end up with a properly balanced wiring that is capable of properly establishing such a link. Also copper cabling deteriorates over time so the measurement protocol might not be worth snitch by the time you try to establish a 10GBase-T connection...Cat.6 is only usable with special qualification (TIA-155-A) over short distances.
DCide - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
I don't think T2k's missing the point at all. Those cables will work fine - especially for the target market for this board.You also had a number of other objections a few weeks ago, when this board was announced. Thankfully most of those have already been answered in the excellent posts here. It's indeed quite possible (and practical) to use the full 10GBase-T bandwidth right now, whether making a single transfer between two machines or serving multiple clients. At the time you said this was *very* difficult, implying no one will be able to take advantage of it. Fortunately, ASRock engineers understood the (very attainable) potential better than this. Hopefully now the market will embrace it, and we'll see more boards like this. Then we'll once again see network speeds that can keep up with everyday storage media (at least for a while).
shodanshok - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
You are right, but the familiar RJ45 & cables can be a strong motivation to go with 10GBase-T in some cases. For a quick example: one of our customer bought two Dell 720xd to use as virtualization boxes. The first R720xd is the active one, while the second 720xd is used as hot-standby being constantly synchronized using DRBD. The two boxes are directly connected with a simple Cat 6e cable.As the final customer was in charge to do both the physical installation and the normal hardware maintenance, a familiar networking equipment as RJ45 port and cables were strongly favored by him.
Moreover, it is expected that within 2 die shrinks 10GBase-T controller become cheap/low power enough that they can be integrated pervasively, similar to how 1GBase-T replaced the old 100 Mb standard.
Regards.
DigitalFreak - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
Don't know why the went with 8 PCI-E lanes for the 10Gig controller. 4 would have been plenty.1 PCI-E 3.0 lane is 1GB per second (x4 = 4GB). 10Gig max is 1.25 GB per second, dual port = 2.5 GB per second. Even with overhead you'd still never saturate an x4 link. Could have used the extra x4 for something else.
The Melon - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
I personally think it would be a perfect board if they replaced the Intel X540 controller with a Mellanox ConnectX-3 dual QSFP solution so we could choose between FDR IB and 40/10/1Gb Ethernet per port.Either that or simply a version with the same slot layout and drop the Intel X540 chip.
Bottom line though is no matter how they lay it out we will find something to complain about.
Ian Cutress - Tuesday, November 1, 2016 - link
The controller is PCIe 2.0, not PCIe 3.0. You need to use a PCIe 3.0 controller to get PCIe 3.0 speeds.eanazag - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
I am assuming we are talking about the free ESXi Hypervisor in the test setup.SR-IOV (IOMMU) is not an enabled feature on ESXi with the free license. What this means is that networking is going to tax the CPU more heavily. Citrix Xenserver does support SR-IOV on the free product, which it is all free now - you just pay for support. This is a consideration to base the results of the testing methodology used here.
Another good way to test 10GbE is using iSCSI where the server side is a NAS and the single client is where the disk is attached. The iSCSI LUN (hard drive) needs have something going on with an SSD. It can just be 3 spindle HDDs in RAID 5. You can use disk test software to drive the benchmarking. If you opt to use Xenserver with Windows as the iSCSI client. Have the VM directly connect to the NAS instead of using Xenserver to the iSCSI LUN because you will hit a performance cap from VM to host in the typical add disk within Xen. This is in older 6.2 version. Creedance is not fully out of beta yet. I have done no testing on Creedance and the contained changes are significant to performance.
About two years ago I was working on coming up with the best iSCSI setup for VMs using HDDs in RAID and SSDs as caches. I was using Intel X540-T2's without a switch. I was working with Nexenta Stor and Sun/Oracle Solaris as iSCSI target servers run on physical hardware, Xen, and VMware. I encountered some interesting behavior in all cases. VMware's sub-storage yielded better hard drive performance. I kept running into an artifical performance limit because of the Windows client and how Xen handles the disks it provides. The recommendation was to add the iSCSI disk directly to the VM as the limit wouldn't show up there. VMware still imposed a performance ding on (Hit>10%) my setup. Physical hardware had the best performance for the NAS side.