ASRock X399 Fatal1ty Professional Gaming Motherboard Review: More Pro than Gaming
Test Configuration & 10Gb Teaser
Test Hardware
The Corsair Crystal Series 570X case still houses our Threadripper test bed, and it pairs well with the ASRock X399 Professional Gaming, as far as aesthetics are concerned. It's a looker, just like the board we're pairing it with.
Antec’s 1200W High Current power supply provides the juice to our Gigabyte GTX 1080 G1 Gaming GPU and Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 2990WX CPUs. G.Skill provides the 32GB of DDR4-3200MHz RAM, and Toshiba's 256GB RD400 M.2 NVMe drive serves as our boot drive. Fractal Design’s Celsius S36 360mm water cooler is placed on the intake side of our chassis to provide cooling for our 190W and 250W processors.
Benchmark Settings
| Synthetic Benchmarks and Settings | |
|---|---|
| PCMark 8 | Version 2.7.613 Home, Work, Storage, Applications (Adobe & Microsoft) |
| SiSoftware Sandra | Version 2016.03.22.21 CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cryptography Memory Bandwidth |
| IOmeter | 4k Random Read, 4k Random Write 128k Sequential Read, 128k Sequential Write |
| Cinebench R15 | Build RC83328DEMO OpenGL Benchmark |
| CompuBench | Version 1.5.8 Face Detection, Optical Flow, Ocean Surface, Ray Tracing |
| 3D Tests ansd Settings | |
| 3DMark 13 | Version 4.47.597.0 Test Set 1: Skydiver, 1920x1080, Default Preset Test Set 2: Firestrike, 1920x1080, Default Preset Test Set 3: Firestrike Extreme, 2560x1440 Default Preset |
| Application Tests and Settings | |
| HandBrake CLI | Version: 0.9.9 Sintel Open Movie Project 4.19 GB 4k mkv to x265 mp4 |
| LAME MP3 | Version 3.98.3 Mixed 271MB WAV to mp3 Command: -b 160 --nores (160 Kb/s) |
| Adobe After Effects CC | Release 2015.3.0 Version 13.8.0.144 PCMark driven routine |
| Adobe Photoshop CC | Release 2015.5.0 20160603.r.88 x64 PCMark driven routine (light and heavy) |
| Adobe InDesign CC | Release 2015.4 Build 11.4.0.90 x64 PCMark driven routine |
| Adobe Illustrator | Release 2015.3.0 Version 20.0.0 (64-bit) PCMark driven routine |
| Blender | Version 2.68a BMW 27 CPU Render Benchmark BMW 27 GPU Render Benchmark |
| 7-Zip | Version 16.02 THG-Workload (7.6 GB) to .7z, command line switches "a -t7z -r -m0=LZMA2 -mx=9" |
| Game Tests and Settings | |
| Ashes of Singularity: Escalation | Version 2.50.28527 High Preset - 1920x1080, Mid Shadow Quality, 1x MSAA Crazy Preset - 1920x1080, High Shadow Quality, 2x MSAA High Preset - 3840x2160, Mid Shadow Quality, 1x MSAA Crazy Preset -3840x2160, High Shadow Quality, 2x MSAA |
| F1 2015* | 2015 Season, Abu Dhabi Track, Rain 1920x1080 - UltraHigh Preset, 16x AF 3840x2160 - UltraHigh Preset, 16x AF |
| Metro Last Light Redux | Version 3.00 x64 High Quality, 1920x1080, High Tesselation Very High Quality, 1920x1080, Very High Tesselation High Quality, 3840x2160, High Tesselation Very High Quality, 3840x2160, Very High Tesselation |
| The Talos Principle | Version 267252 1920x1080 - Medium Preset, High Quality, High Tesselation, 4x AF 1920x1080 - Ultra Preset, VeryHigh Quality, VeryHigh Tesselation, 16x AF 3840x2160 - Medium Preset, High Quality, High Tesselation, 4x AF 3840x2160 - Ultra Preset, VeryHigh Quality, VeryHigh Tesselation, 16x AF |
- 10gb-stock
- 10gb-download-stock
With the inclusion of the Aquantia AC107 chip on this board, we must shoehorn a “test” beyond our standard motherboard scope. For our purposes today, we connected the 10GBASE-T interface into our workstation's BCM57810 dual-port 10Gb network card and configured them onto a 10.0.0.x private network. From there, we transfer a 14.5GB video file from a recent stream from one NVMe share point to the other computer and vice-versa.
Out of the box, the NIC was able to hit 986MB/s download speeds and provided smooth 1.10GB/s upload speeds to the other host. It is quite impressive that this NIC required no tweaking of settings such as jumbo frames or disabling certain flow parameters as mentioned in several guides online. Turn-key implementation of a high-speed interface is always a plus in our book.
Lastly, we managed to get our hands on a 2990WX processor for use with some of our X399 testing as we gear up for a future project, so we will try to keep that data isolated to our 32-core content section (page 5). All overall value, performance, and conclusions generated in this article are geared towards the standard 1000 and 2000 series processors.
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ARE YOU FRIGGING KIDDING ME? Aren't you the site that recommend the 9900k as a GAMING CPU with a 600$ motherboard? How is that value proposition for gamers by the way? Why not just saying that your money is better invested in a GPU than a CPU for games? Of course you didn't think it was important last Friday...
By the way, nothing about the review particularly, just the obvious double standard and lack of consistency throughout the site.
The Terk is seeing gaming situations where disabling some of the big AMD processor's cores boosts gaming performance. So maybe you're better off as a gamer to get a model with fewer cores.
Once you figure out that part, ask yourself a question: Is yours even an honest question? The 9900K review appears to offer up the 9700K as a more-realistic alternative. "The Core i7-9700K, even at stock settings, is competitive with the -9900K in most titles, especially considering the $115 you save by stepping down a notch." followed with the last sentence reading "but the (9900K's) $500 asking price relegates it to the most extreme performance enthusiasts."
Thanks for the feedback, hit me up on the community Discord if you wanna chat more about it. I'm on there a lot
Its a workstation/home server/networked renderbox platform which is where the use-case value is at. For 32 cores of Zen goodness, 10gbit and decent...ish power delivery these boards and CPUs are actually remarkably cheap, compare for instance to a dual-socket, 2x16-core Intel setup.
AsRock's likely reason to stick 'gamer' on there is its associated with the Fatality brand, which they are apparently set on pairing with 10GBit controllers.
The gaming and windows benchmarks don't really agree with the 2990WX, this is known from previous reviews. Windows doesn't properly work with anything over 16-cores and ffs, don't buy a 32-core CPU for playing some vidja games.
That all said, I do think this board would have made more sense without the extraneous features. The wifi and gaming-ish features are kind of extraneous.