The ASRock X299 Taichi Motherboard Review
by Joe Shields on October 31, 2017 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- ASRock
- SLI
- CrossFire
- Taichi
- X299
- Skylake-X
- Kaby Lake-X
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.
Here we are including data from all the boards we have tested in the lab, including ones without a formal full review. It is noticable that the MSI motherboards adopt Multi-Core Turbo, although different boards seem to prioritise different benchmark styles for the turbo.
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.
Blender testing results between the boards were close together, with the Taichi landed in the middle of the group taking 204 seconds to complete. The difference between the two ASRock boards would only be noticeable if you were keeping track of time. It would take a render over 3 hours to see a minute difference between them.
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 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
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 WinRAR testing, the Taichi was in ahead of the i9, but still looking up at the other motherboards in this testing. Riding tall at the top are the MSI boards due to implementation of turbo modes.
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.
For 7Zip, the results here are about the same with the Taichi in the middle scoring 58.9K with the Gaming i9 margin of error away below it at 58.7K. The Gaming Pro Carbon AC leads the group again scoring 61.1K or ~4% higher that the Taichi.
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.
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).
In our last system benchmark, DigiCortex, The Taichi takes its familiar spot in the middle of this pack at 1.16x realtime simulation. The Gaming i9 is just behind it at 1.15x while the Gaming Pro Carbon AC manages 1.21x.
17 Comments
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Joe Shields - Wednesday, November 1, 2017 - link
We have updated the article with additional information which answers your question. Basically, with a 44 or 28 lane CPU, x8 lanes will go to the 5th PCIe slot. Since it shares lanes with the first PCIe slot, it will also drop down to x8.Qasar - Wednesday, November 1, 2017 - link
hmmm makes the threadripper platform look even better....acewtrading2009 - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link
I feel that it is still good for the development platform
<a href="https://acewtrading.com/fmcg/import-export-busines... business</a>
mattkiss - Wednesday, November 1, 2017 - link
Why not review the X299 Taichi XE instead?:https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/X299%20Taichi%20XE...
Joe Shields - Wednesday, November 1, 2017 - link
When we received the Taichi for review, the XE version was not out at the time.mattkiss - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link
Oh ok, I understand. Thx!tesladan - Saturday, November 4, 2017 - link
As far as I can tell from reading different X299 reviews only ASRock has M.2 slot that uses cpu PCIe lanes instead of chipset limited DMI3.0 lanes. So instead of Asus Tuf X299 Mark 2 , this Tacihi XE will be better choice.If there is any other X299 motherboards using cpu for PCIe lanes, let me know.
Dan