ASRock X99 WS-E/10G Motherboard Review: Dual 10GBase-T for Prosumers

ASRock X99 WS-E/10G In The Box

High end motherboards that cater to a general market tend to feature enough extras in the box especially if they are aligned to a gaming brand or the overclocking crowd. With motherboards that focus on one particular feature, the trend tends to be the opposite, as these motherboards are purchased exclusively for that feature. With the X99 WS-E/10G aiming at the higher end of the market on multiple fronts, there offered much more possibility from ASRock, and as such multi-SLI bridges are included.

In the box we get the following:

Rear IO Shield
Driver DVD
Manuals
Six SATA Cables
Flexi 2-way SLI Cable
Rigid 3-way SLI Cable
Rigid 4-way SLI Cable

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:

Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs and SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.

Test Setup

ASRock X99 WS-E/10G Overclocking

Experience with ASRock X99 WS-E/10G

Nothing out of the ordinary for overclocking with the WS-E/10G - we get several automatic overclocking options in the software which are mirrored in the BIOS under 'Optimized CPU Setting'. This offers 4.0 GHz, 4.2 GHz, 4.4 GHz and 4.5 GHz options with varying levels of load line calibration and voltage.

While manual overclocking is not usually the focus of workstation motherboards, ASRock puts their usual array of options in to allow control of voltages, the FIVR, and the DRAM. We didn't achieve anything special in terms of overclocking due our mid-performance CPU.

Methodology

Our standard overclocking methodology is as follows. We select the automatic overclock options and test for stability with PovRay and OCCT to simulate high-end workloads. These stability tests aim to catch any immediate causes for memory or CPU errors.

For manual overclocks, based on the information gathered from previous testing, starts off at a nominal voltage and CPU multiplier, and the multiplier is increased until the stability tests are failed. The CPU voltage is increased gradually until the stability tests are passed, and the process repeated until the motherboard reduces the multiplier automatically (due to safety protocol) or the CPU temperature reaches a stupidly high level (100ºC+). Our test bed is not in a case, which should push overclocks higher with fresher (cooler) air.

Overclock Results