The ASUS ROG Maximus X Apex Review: X Marks the Spot, Literally
by Joe Shields on May 11, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Asus
- ROG
- Aquantia
- 5G
- Coffee Lake
- Z370
Benchmark Overview
For our testing, depending on the product, we attempt to tailor the presentation of our global benchmark suite down into what users who would buy this hardware might actually want to run. For CPUs, our full test suite is typically used to gather data and all the results are placed into Bench, our benchmark database for users that want to look at non-typical benchmarks or legacy data. For motherboards, we run our short form CPU tests, the gaming tests with half the GPUs of our processor suite, and our system benchmark tests which focus on non-typical and non-obvious performance metrics that are the focal point for specific groups of users.
The benchmarks fall into several areas:
Short Form CPU
Our short form testing script uses a straight run through of a mixture of known apps or workloads and requires about four hours. These are typically the CPU tests we run in our motherboard suite, to identify any performance anomalies.
| CPU Short Form Benchmarks | |
| Three Dimensional Particle Movement v2.1 (3DPM) | 3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, derived from my academic research years looking at particle movement parallelism. The coding for this tool was rough, but emulates the real world in being non-CompSci trained code for a scientific endeavor. The code is unoptimized, but the test uses OpenMP to move particles around a field using one of six 3D movement algorithms in turn, each of which is found in the academic literature. |
| The second version of this benchmark is similar to the first, however it has been re-written in VS2012 with one major difference: the code has been written to address the issue of false sharing. If data required by multiple threads, say four, is in the same cache line, the software cannot read the cache line once and split the data to each thread - instead it will read four times in a serial fashion. The new software splits the data to new cache lines so reads can be parallelized and stalls minimized. | |
| WinRAR 5.4 | WinRAR is a compression based software to reduce file size at the expense of CPU cycles. We use the version that has been a stable part of our benchmark database through 2015, and run the default settings on a 1.52GB directory containing over 2800 files representing a small website with around thirty half-minute videos. We take the average of several runs in this instance. |
| POV-Ray 3.7.1 b4 | POV-Ray is a common ray-tracing tool used to generate realistic looking scenes. We've used POV-Ray in its various guises over the years as a good benchmark for performance, as well as a tool on the march to ray-tracing limited immersive environments. We use the built-in multi threaded benchmark. |
| HandBrake v1.0.2 | HandBrake is a freeware video conversion tool. We use the tool in to process two different videos into x264 in an MP4 container - first a 'low quality' two-hour video at 640x388 resolution to x264, then a 'high quality' ten-minute video at 4320x3840, and finally the second video again but into HEVC. The low-quality video scales at lower performance hardware, whereas the buffers required for high-quality tests can stretch even the biggest processors. At current, this is a CPU only test. |
| 7-Zip 9.2 | 7-Zip is a freeware compression/decompression tool that is widely deployed across the world. We run the included benchmark tool using a 50MB library and take the average of a set of fixed-time results. |
| DigiCortex v1.20 | 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. |
System Benchmarks
Our system benchmarks are designed to probe motherboard controller performance, particularly any additional USB controllers or the audio controller. As general platform tests we have DPC Latency measurements and system boot time, which can be difficult to optimize for on the board design and manufacturing level.
| System Benchmarks | |
| Power Consumption | One of the primary differences between different motherboads is power consumption. Aside from the base defaults that every motherboard needs, things like power delivery, controller choice, routing and firmware can all contribute to how much power a system can draw. This increases for features such as PLX chips and multi-gigabit ethernet. |
| Non-UEFI POST Time | The POST sequence of the motherboard becomes before loading the OS, and involves pre-testing of onboard controllers, the CPU, the DRAM and everything else to ensure base stability. The number of controllers, as well as firmware optimizations, affect the POST time a lot. We test the BIOS defaults as well as attempt a stripped POST. |
| Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.2.5 | Testing onboard audio is difficult, especially with the numerous amount of post-processing packages now being bundled with hardware. Nonetheless, manufacturers put time and effort into offering a 'cleaner' sound that is loud and of a high quality. RMAA, with version 6.2.5 (newer versions have issues), under the right settings can be used to test the signal-to-noise ratio, signal crossover, and harmonic distortion with noise. |
| USB Backup | USB ports can come from a variety of sources: chipsets, controllers or hubs. More often than not, the design of the traces can lead to direct impacts on USB performance as well as firmware level choices relating to signal integrity on the motherboard. |
| DPC Latency | Another element is deferred procedure call latency, or the ability to handle interrupt servicing. Depending on the motherboard firmware and controller selection, some motherboards handle these interrupts quicker than others. A poor result could lead to delays in performance, or for example with audio, a delayed request can manifest in distinct audible pauses, pops or clicks. |
Gaming
Our gaming benchmarks are designed to show any differences in performance when playing games.
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evernessince - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Correct although technically PS/2 could have lower latency in some situations. PS/2 keyboards and mice work based on interrupts while USB works by polling. In otherwards, when you press a key/click your mouse on a PS/2 device your request is immediately processed. USB on the otherhand waits until the device is next polled.TBH I've never seen a PS/2 vs USB latency test and I've personally never noticed a difference. Then again I haven't tested them strictly against each other on a high refresh rate monitor either.
voicequal - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
Those active PS/2 to USB adapters never worked very well. Lots of missed inputs or stuck keys. The passive adapters require that the peripheral device switch into a PS/2 mode, supported by some mice, but not all PS/2 in general. Also some KVMs work only with PS/2 if that is your thing.HStewart - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
10 USB Ports in way more than I can remember on motherboards. My Supermicro Xeon didn't have that many ports on it.But one thing I see missing in motherboards today is Thunderbolt 3 - maybe it is notebook thing - and future generation will have it. What is really nice is you can hook up dual Display Ports on it - not sure how that works with graphics cards today.
DanNeely - Saturday, May 12, 2018 - link
I think I've seen 1 or 2 boards with 12 out the back. 8/10 is around the normal upper limit though, partly for space reasons and partly due to chipset limits. For the last decade or so Intel's offered 14 USB ports on its high end southbridges with a gradually increasing number of the total supporting USB3; since most mobos have 2 or 3 on board headers for front panel ports or various misc internal uses (eg a few PSUs that connect to an internal 2.0 header to report stats) that leaves 8 or 10 total ports free for the back panel. Mobo vendors can get around this a bit by using onboard hubs or controllers (until recently this was the only way to get 10Gb ports), but to a large extent that's faking it until they can't make it. With a hub because you end up needing to know exactly what's going on inside the board if you need to connect multiple high speed devices at once to keep them from bottlenecking each other. PCIe controllers either end up with the same bottleneck problem, or if they have enough lanes to avoid it end up eating the equivalent number of SB ports instead.I've seen a few rumors that Intel's planning to integrate TB3 directly into the platform without needing a separate controller in the future. OTOH unless they add extra PCIe lanes to the CPU it's still probably going to be rare on desktop boards. TB3 is PCIe3 x4 equivalent, so a single connection on the southbridge could eat all of its bandwidth to the CPU. On most laptops to avoid that (and presumably to simplify the GPU out signalling) they use lanes from the CPU instead. On enthusiast desktops those 16 lanes are normally all used for the GPU though, and since PLXes PCIe switches are stupidly expensive now ($80 for a x16 to two x16 model) the only way to do that would be to limit the GPU to x8 instead of x16. In the real world that wouldn't matter much; but marketing is aimed at the clueless and a lot of them would freak.
Destoya - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
The Asus Crosshair VI Hero has the most USB ports of any boards I'm aware of. 2x USB 3.1, 8x USB 3.0, and 4x USB 2.0 on the back panel for a total of 14, though to be fair it only has a single LAN port and no display out. Somewhat ironically for the new Crosshair VII, they dropped two of the USB 2.0 ports for a PS/2 combo port.DanNeely - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
AMD's got a slightly higher max USB port count than Intel, 2 3.1g2 ports, 10 3.1g1 (4CPU, 6 chipset), and 6 2.0 ports; but even there that board is using at least one 3rd party controller for the front panel 3.1g2 header (or they could be routing the chipset ports to that header and using the 3rd party controller on the back).swapping 2 of the 2.0 ports for a PS/2 seems reasonable to me; some people want them (ie those whose high end keyboard is more than a few years old and doesn't support N-key rollover via an extension to the original ~20 year old spec/driver); and the list of devices that have interference problems one 3.0 ports is very short so not many people need more than 1 or 2).
OTOH other than cost reasons or wanting to keep space for their logo I don't see any reason they couldn't've added both; there seems to be enough back panel space for another stack of ports.
StevoLincolnite - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
You could add another 5+ USB ports on the back I reckon.I can't be the only one with half a dozen external HDD's?
sibuna - Saturday, June 2, 2018 - link
if you are seriously using 1/2 a dozen external USB HDDs just build a NAS, it will serve you betterdgingeri - Saturday, May 12, 2018 - link
1. the PS2 ports run off a PS2 to USB adapter on the board anyway, so they really aren't proper PS2 ports. The X390 chipset doesn't support any path for PS2 ports. So, there really is no advantage on that.2. Those PS2 ports could easily be replaced with 4 USB ports, and they could be run with 2X 2.0 and 2X 3.0. There are enough USB 3.0 ports available from the chipset to do that. USB keyboards run better directly off the root hub anyway. The problems most people have with them having lost input usually comes because the keyboard is being run off a hub. On top of that, I know from direct experience, most USB hubs have major reliability and operational problems. I do my best to avoid running anything through a hub these days because of the repeated and consistent problems I have had with them. I seem to find a good hub once in a while, only to have it die a couple months later. We NEED those ports on the back of those boards, and then some dumb engineer comes up with the idea to use 2 of those ports to make one USB-C header for some front panel port that is supported by only 1 case. My Maximus X Hero Wifi has only 8 ports, so I'm stuck with running my UPS, Nostromo, and mouse off a hub, which is not what I like.
3. There are a LOT of people who go for such advantages in hardware who are just fantasizing over it making them a better player, when it simply won't help. So, stop with the idea that any more than a very bare few actually need PS2 ports.
DanNeely - Sunday, May 13, 2018 - link
This is a Z370 board, and Z370 still has an LPC bus (a quasi-serial version of the ancient ISA bus) which has been the traditional location to mount the control chip for PS2 and other ultra-legacy IO ports. Without scouring the board images itself to figure out what controller is being used, I can't answer how it's being connected but the chipset does have the IO needed to support a non-USB PS2 port.And while the chipset does have theoretical additional USB3 lanes available, it doesn't have free HSIO ports to run them on without going into configuration hell where using feature X disables feature Y, Z370 has a total of 30 of them to split among USB3, SATA, and PCIe lanes from the chipset. The board breaks down as:
1 Intel network
1-4 AQC108 5GBe (maybe only 1-2, the Aquitania page doesn't differentiate between requirements for their 5 and 10Gb controllers)
1 Realtek audio
4+1+1=6 PCIe lanes
4 Sata
4+4=8 M.2 slots
6+2 USB3.0 (back panel and front panel header)
2 ASM USB3.1g2 controller
That adds up to 31-34 already so at least one item is already being switched on/off depending on what else is in use.
https://content.hwigroup.net/images/editorial/1920...