The ASRock X299 Extreme4 Motherboard Review: $200 Entry To HEDT

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.

For our Blender result, the ASRock X299 Extreme4 took 203 seconds to complete the Blender benchmark leaving it in the top half of our results. Clock speeds hit 3.6 GHz during the test while using all cores which the majority of boards tested also appear to do. Again notice the other two MSI boards taking less time to complete the benchmark due to how the board works turbo/MCE. 

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.

Our POV-Ray results for the X299 Ex4 scores in the middle of the pack at 4,655. Other MSI boards appear to have the most aggressive clock speeds leading this tightly grouped pack of results. The EVGA boards brought up the rear of the pack with its conservative clock speeds for all cores and AVX instructions. 

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.

WinRAR data has the ASRock X299 Ex4 coming in at 34.8 seconds which lands it in the middle of the pack where the majority of the results are. This makes sense due to the Ex4's implementation of MCE. 

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.

Our 7-Zip results are VERY close together with only two outliers at the top and bottom of the results. The ASRock X299 Extreme4 fits in with the rest of the results so there is nothing anomalous here. In this test, the CPU boosted to 4.0 GHz as did the majority in this group. 

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.

Similarly, the 3DPM result lands the X299 Ex4 in the middle of the pack. During this test it performs six mini-tests with a 10-second gap between them: our result is from a 3.6 GHz CPU clock speed during the test. 

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 the DigiCortex testing, the ASRock board mixes in with the other datasets with a 1.15 fraction of real-time simulation possible. All results except the ATX MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC, our most aggressive clocker of the bunch, are within a couple percent of each other.