The ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate Motherboard Review: Aquantia 10GbE on Ryzen
by Gavin Bonshor on August 2, 2018 9:00 AM ESTCPU 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 put the memory settings at the CPU manufacturers suggested frequency, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v1.0.2: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container: a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short. We also take the third video and transcode it to HEVC. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.4: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2017. 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.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test v2.1: 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. We are using the latest version of 3DPM, which has a significant number of tweaks over the original version to avoid issues with cache management and speeding up some of the algorithms.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: 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.
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.
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AdrianB1 - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
The implementation can be very different, if only 1 or 2 PCIe 2.0 lanes are linked to the chip the performance is not a known quantity. We know the max speed of the chipset, we don't know how it was implemented on this expensive motherboard.Would you bet your money on a good implementation?Amoro - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Why is there such a noticeable performance delta? Is that B350 Tomahawk doing some weird overclocking?4everalone - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
That's a whole lot of work you guys did and I don't mean to discount it in anyway. But it makes me wonder, isn't the point of going for x470 instead of the x370 to take better advantage of what the new processors have to offer? So why go through this full blown review using an older processor? Was the 2700x unavailable at the time you started with this?29a - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
They used an odd assortment of games too.DanNeely - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
games need to be fully scriptable via commandline for automated data collection, which eliminates a number of otherwise popular games. The gamelist itself is updated about once/year (looks like still v2017), but needs to keep a decent fraction of last years list to allow some comparison between new and old reviews.Ratman6161 - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
I suspect the reason is that if they used a 2xxx CPU to test the x470 and B450 boards then they would have to re-test all the x370 and B350 boards in order to make all the tests comparable.pixelstuff - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
I'm glad to see another motherboard with a 10G NIC, but I'd really like to the new 2.5G protocol start showing up on everything. Surely that can work in situations where the 10G would be to hot.JlHADJOE - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Dude, you can't just put "Aquantia 10GbE on Ryzen" in the headline and do zero network testing. This review is a total bait and switch!Flappergast - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Please explain why this new top Board is doing 47.8 FPS while the old budget board msi b350 is doing 52.5 FPS in Ashes?WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
This concerns me. That alone is keeping me from buying one.