The MSI X299 Tomahawk Arctic Motherboard Review: White as Snow
by Joe Shields on November 20, 2017 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- MSI
- M.2
- USB 3.1
- X299
- Skylake-X
- Tomahawk
- Tomahawk Arctic
Gaming Performance 2017: AoTS Escalation
Ashes of the Singularity is a Real Time Strategy game developed by Oxide Games and Stardock Entertainment. The original AoTS was released back in March of 2016 while the standalone expansion pack, Escalation, was released in November of 2016 adding more structures, maps, and units. We use this specific benchmark as it relies on both a good GPU as well as on the CPU in order to get the most frames per second. This balance is able to better display any system differences in gaming as opposed to a more GPU heavy title where the CPU and system doesn't matter quite as much. We use the default "Crazy" in-game settings using the DX11 rendering path in both 1080p and 4K UHD resolutions. The benchmark is run four times and the results averaged then plugged into the graph.
In our gaming testing, the Tomahawk Arctic was inline with the rest of our results.
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Lolimaster - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
Why buy this when Threaripper X399 is better in every possible way, like more pci-e lane, upgrades for the next 3 years. Modular arch.Lolimaster - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
You can use ECC out of the box, nvme bootable raid, etc.mkaibear - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1904?vs=19...That's why (note not identical parts because it's a 12 core TR vs an 8 core i7 - but they are as close as I can get in terms of costs). If I went the other way and went with a 10 core i9 vs the 16 core TR then we see roughly the same pattern of behaviour.
Threadripper wins in the multithreaded tests so long as the workload suits it but for the many benchmarks it's per-core speed which is more important than number of cores.
In essence, if your work requires fast cores and quite a few threads then you're better off with the i7 or i9, if it utilizes loads of threads but speed is less important then you're better off with the TR.
So; given that there are obvious use cases for both processors I'm afraid I can't agree that "Threadripper X399 is better in every possible way".
BroderLund - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
For instance if you look at video encoding. Puget Systems are incredible detailed in their testing. Check out their Skylake-X vs Threadripper articles for both Premiere Pro CC and Davinci Resolve here:https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/DaVinci...
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premier...
You can see that thredripper is not "better in every possible way". It really depends what is the most important in the system. RAW cpu power, expandability, multi gpu, multi nvme including multi gpu, raid cards, network cards and so on.
DanNeely - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
TR can also win if you need the extra PCIe lanes; but with SLI/xFire both slowly dying in the 2 card version and more rapidly in the 3/4 card formats the need for a huge number of lanes is going away for gaming.rsandru - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
My two 1080Tis are doing just fine, no need to worry :-)eek2121 - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
Hopefully the BIOS/UEFI on this board isn't as buggy as the X399 board I have. Broken fan profiles, settings corruption over time, etc. all plague my X399 board. This was my first MSI board and it's going to be my last!Joe Shields - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
The fan I had attached during testing (a DC fan) worked fine throughout the testing period. No settings corrupted over time but, it was only a week or so it was on the test bench.eek2121 - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
Did you try setting a custom profile in the bios? For my X399 I tried changing the fans to go from 0% to 100% in a range from 40C-66C, the end result is that the fans don't end up turning on at all.Joe Shields - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
No custom profiles, no. The default set worked.