The ASRock Z370 Taichi Motherboard Review: Competitive at $220, Aggressive at $190

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 for the supported frequency of the processor for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.

Rendering - Blender 2.78: link

For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.

Our Blender results for the Taichi are on the faster side of the results taking 305 seconds to complete. Nothing out of line here.

Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, 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 1-2 minutes on high-end platforms.

In our next rendering test, POV-Ray, the Taichi score 3422 points per second which also has it on the faster side of the very tight set of results. 

Compression – WinRAR 5.4: 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.

In our compression tests, the Z370 Taichi managed to easily beat the rest of the results with a time of 36.9 seconds. The initial thought on why this came to be was due to an aggressive MCE. However, after running some sanity checks against the board, the core and cache clock speeds both ran at 4.3 GHz which is where most motherboards tested ran. If MCE didn't do it, the next theory is the updated OS having something to do with it. 

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.

Moving on to 7-Zip, the board performed as expected here again with results in the fat part of the bell curve. 

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 win 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.

In 3DPM21, The Z370 Taichi reached 1822 Mop/s, placing it in the middle of other results. The scores of almost all Z370 and i7-8700K testing were within 60 points (around 3%) of each other. The CPUs all ran the same speeds in this test, so again we see a margin of error size differences between our datasets so far. 

Neuron Simulation - DigiCortex v1.20: link

The newest benchmark in our suite is DigiCortex, a simulation of biologically plausible neural network circuits, and simulates activity of neurons and synapses. DigiCortex relies heavily on a mix of DRAM speed and computational throughput, indicating that systems which apply memory profiles properly should benefit and those that play fast and loose with overclocking settings might get some extra speed up. Results are taken during the steady state period in a 32k neuron simulation and represented as a function of the ability to simulate in real time (1.000x equals real-time).

The DigiCortex results have the i7-8700K coming in at our highest result yet of 1.19 fractions of real-time simulation possible looking down at the rest of the results. DigiCortex does show a decent spread between results which is different than we have seen previously. Again after sanity checks, we confirmed the clocks were the same and expecting this result to be a product of the new OS and testing adjustments.