The ASRock Z170 Extreme7+ Review: When You Need Triple M.2 x4 in RAID
by Ian Cutress on November 27, 2015 11:59 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- ASRock
- M.2
- Skylake
- Z170
CPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC (DDR4-2133 C15) for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
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. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link
Similarly to WinRAR, the FastStone test us updated for 2014 to the latest version. FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and thus single threaded performance is often the winner.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
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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DanNeely - Monday, November 30, 2015 - link
Immediate availability isn't a concern, and I'd rather have a 2x type C model anyway (Asus has announced one, but it's a 5.25" bay enclosure for a full height expansion card making it a bit of a WTF); I probably won't have a USB-C device until late summer/early fall of next year.If these can be made usable with Haswell at all is a bigger concern for me. I know I'd be bandwidth limited and only able to hit max speed on one port if the second is idle; but that's a limitation I could live with.
pedjache - Monday, November 30, 2015 - link
It's actually ASmedia controller that drives the front panel, so apart from the fact that using SATAexpress will probably disable 2 of your SATA ports, I see no other concern on usability with haswell.nunya112 - Friday, November 27, 2015 - link
how many layers in the motherboard? is there copper etc.??ASROCK interests me, as they are better priced. if they start to have better components etc. and now the only issue I have is the motherboards are usually thin, and quite flexible
extide - Monday, November 30, 2015 - link
Why do you care about the # of layers? Do you mistakenly think that more is better?tuxRoller - Saturday, November 28, 2015 - link
How many samples did you use to determine that dpc time?careyd - Saturday, November 28, 2015 - link
Ian, love the article, read every word, studied every chart. Desperate to see the headline feature of triple M2 RAID benchmarked. Preferably with Samsung 950's, since I think adapting to the Intel 750's is a lot less elegant despite the possibility of greater performance. This type of arrangement should saturate anyway. But want to see throughput and IOPS numbers. Also, if this beggar can be a chooser, I'd love to see benchmarkes of two of the M.2's striped, with a third running solo. I could envision a number of reasons why this configuration might be a preferable, having a solo M.2 for system drive and the striped pair for other data intensive tasks/media/etc. I think it would make a heck of a cache drive for Adobe After Effects.TesseractOrion - Sunday, November 29, 2015 - link
I think I'd choose striped for OS, solo for redundancy instead, I'd want the OS to be as responsive as humanly (computerly) possible.jasonelmore - Sunday, November 29, 2015 - link
what a waste. the OS is never going to need 2.1GB Per second write and reads. Only a scratch disk or video editing app would use it, then you might as well use careyd configurationmurak01 - Sunday, November 29, 2015 - link
A few tests with three 950 Pro in RAID0 would be interesting. Thanks for a good review!Reflex - Sunday, November 29, 2015 - link
Right now you can pick up 250GB Samsung 850 EVO M.2 SSD's for only $79 at Newegg and Amazon. Given that this board is $220, dropping $240 on storage is not ridiculous and should perform exceptionally well.