The ASRock X99 Extreme11 Review: Eighteen SATA Ports with Haswell-E
by Ian Cutress on March 11, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Storage
- ASRock
- X99
- LGA2011-3
ASRock X99 Extreme11 In The Box
With money-is-no-object type motherboards, the package has to consider the market. Do prosumers want 18 SATA cables, or are they using a system with a backplane that comes with it all? Are buyers going to want to game, or are they Xeon Phi users for compute and don't need SLI bridges? One could argue that given the cost of the package, it should all be bundled anyway to encompass all users, but event at this price bracket if the manufacturer can save a few cents, they might do so.
In the ASRock X99 Extreme11 box we get the following:
Driver DVD
User Manuals
Rear IO Shield
HDD Saver Cable
Six SATA Cables
Two Rigid 2-way dual-slot SLI connectors
One Rigid 2-way quad-slot SLI connector
One Rigid 4-way SLI connector
Two M.2 Screws
A Carry Bag
This is pretty much what I would have expected from a motherboard like this. As it does not fall under the gaming or overclocking lines, there are no gaming or OC add-ons: just cables and SLI bridges. It might have been interesting to have included a drive bay for the two onboard USB 3.0 headers, especially one that might fit a boot drive also. Perhaps because in 2015 a lot of cases come with at least one USB 3.1 header now, ASRock sees little need.
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
| Test Setup | |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-5960X ES 8 Cores, 16 Threads, 3.0 GHz (3.5 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards | ASRock X99 Extreme11 |
| Cooling | Cooler Master Nepton 140XL |
| Power Supply | OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
| Memory | Corsair DDR4-2133 C15 4x8 GB 1.2V G.Skill Ripjaws 4 DDR4-2133 C15 4x8 GB 1.2V |
| Memory Settings | JEDEC @ 2133 |
| Video Cards | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB (1150/1202 Boost) |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA Drivers 332.21 |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 |
ASRock X99 Extreme11 Overclocking
Experience with ASRock X99 Extreme11
While the positioning of the Extreme11 indicates it is a board more so for functionality rather than overclocking, it does offer ASRock’s base array of overclocking options in both the BIOS and software. This includes the Optimized CPU OC Configuration drop downs in both the BIOS and software, although it should be noted that Xeons cannot overclock via the multiplier.
With our mediocre CPU, the automatic overclocks at 4.4 GHz and beyond caused BSODs when under AVX load, but manual overclocking did give 4.4 GHz at a rather high voltage. There is not much to conclude, due to our processor not being the best, but other motherboards have achieved around the same result with the CPU we have.
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
Power delta between the stock and highest overclocked performance gives +152W, and when allowing for the 140W TDP gives an estimated total power consumption at 292W when overclocked to 4.4 GHz.
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Vorl - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
ahh, like I said, I might have missed something. Thanks!I was just looking at the haswell family and know it does support IGP. I didn't know that 2011/-E doesn't
yuhong - Saturday, March 14, 2015 - link
Yea, servers are where 2D graphics on a separate chip on the motherboard is still common.Kevin G - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
Native PCIe SSDs or 10G Ethernet controllers would make good use of the PCIe slots.A PCIe slot will be necessary for graphics, at lest during first time setup. Socket 2011-3 chips don't have integrated graphics so it is necessary. (It is possible to setup everything headless but you'll be glad you have a GPU if anything goes wrong.)
As for why use the LSI controller, it is a decent HBA for software RAID like those used under ZFS. For FreeNAS/NAS4Free users, the numerous number of ports enables some rather larger arrays or features like hot sparing or SSD caching.
Vorl - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
for 10G Ethernet controllers/Fiber HBAs you only need (need is such a strong word too, considering 10g ethernet, and 8gb fiber only need 3 and 2 lanes respectively for PCIe 2.0.) 8x slots. for super fast PCIe storage like SSDs you only need 4x slots which is still 2GB/s for PCIe 2.0 They would have been better served adding more PCIe 8x slots, but then again, what would be the point of 18 SATA slots if you were going to add storage controllers in the PCIe 16x slots?The 4x16 PCIE x16 slots makes me think compute server, but that doesn't mesh with 18 SATA ports. If the database engines were able to use graphics cards now (which I know is being worked on) this system might make more sense.
It still makes me think they just tried to slap a bunch of stuff together without any real thought about what the system would really be used for. I am all for goign fishing and seeing what people would use a board like this for, except that the $600 price tag put's it out of anyone but the most specialized use cases.
As for the LSI controller, like someone mentioned above, you can get a cheaper board with 8x sata PCIe cards to give you the same number of ports. More ports even since most boards these days come with 6x sata 6Gbs connections The 1mb of cache is so silly for the LSI chip that it's laughable.
The 128mb of cache for the RAID controller is a little better, but again, with just 6 RAID ports, what's the point?
The whole board is just a mess of confusion.
3DoubleD - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
Similar to my thinking in my post above.If you are going for a software RAID setup with a ludicrous number of SATA ports, you can get a Z97 board with 3 full PCIe slots (x8,x8,x4) with 8 SATA ports. With three supermicro cards (two 8x SATAIII and one 8x SATAII because of the x4 PCIe slot) you would have 32 SATA ports and it would cost you $650. The software raid I use "only" accepts up to 25 drives, so that last card is only necessary if you need that 1 extra drive, so for $500 you could run a 24 drive array with a M.2 or SATA Express SSD for a cache/system drive. And as you pointed out, since it is Z97, it would have on board video.
Basically, given the price of these non-RAID add-in SATA cards, I'd say that any manufacturer making a marketing play on SATA ports needs to keep the cost of each additional SATA port to <$20/port over the price of a board with similar PCIe slot configurations.
As you said, if this board had 18 SATA ports that could support hardware RAID, then it would be worth the additional price tag. This is probably not possible though since 10 SATA ports are from the chipset and the rest from an additional controller. For massive hardware RAID setups your better off getting a PCIe 2.0 x16 card (for 16 SATAIII drives) or a PCIe 3.0 x16 card (if such a thing even exists, it could theoretically handle 32 SATAIII drives). I'm sure such large hardware RAID arrays become overwhelming for the controller and would cost a fortune.
Anyway, this must be some niche prosumer application that requires ludicrous amounts of non-RAID storage and 4 co-processor slots. I can't imagine what it is though.
Runiteshark - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
No clue why they didn't do a LSI 3108 and have the port for the add on BBU and cache unit like Supermicro does on some of their boards. Also not sure why these companies can't put 10g copper connectors at minimum on these boards. Again, supermicro does it without issue.DanNeely - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
There're people who think combining their gaming godbox and blueray rip mega storage box into a single computer is a good idea. They're the potential market for a monstrosity like this.You know what they say, "A fool and his money will probably make someone else rich."
Murloc - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
I guess this is aimed at the rather unlikely situation of someone wanting both storage and computation/gaming in the same place.You know, there are people out there who just want the best and don't care about wasting money on features they don't need.
Zak - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
I agree. For reasons Vorl mentioned this is a pointless board. I can't imagine a target market for this. My first reaction was also, wow, beastly storage server. But then yeah, different controllers. What is the point?eanazag - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
It is not a server board. Haswell-E desktop board. I have no use for that many SATA ports but someone might.2 x DVD or BD drives
2 x SSDs on RAID 1 for boot
Use Windows to mirror the two below RAID 0 volumes.
7 x SSDs in RAID 0
7 x SSDs in RAID 0
The mirrored RAID 0 volumes could get you about 3-6 GBps transfer rates on reads from a 400 MBps SSD in sequential read. Maybe a little less in write speeds. All done with mediocre SSDs.
This machine would cost over $2000.