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Test Configuration and Benchmarks
We’ve covered the high-, middle- and low-end price ranges for X399. Today we’re going to use some samples from across the spectrum to see where the ASRock X399 Phantom Gaming 6 falls in terms of performance, overclocking, and overall design. Our test bench hasn't changed since the platform launched, so our data is for the most part comparable across the samples. With that said, some driver or Windows updates might have impacted performance, but not to a large degree
Our synthetic PCMark ’08 data shows a bit of variation across the samples, with the largest gaps coming in the Work, Office, Home workloads. The largest gap is seen with Work, and that unfortunately takes our favorite Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 down to last place by quite a margin. Sandra Arithmetic picks no favorites, and each board under the microscope gets wins in one category or another. Multimedia scores are not favoring the Phantom Gaming 6, scoring it 9 percent behind the Aorus Xtreme. However, Cryptography shines a ray of hope upon the Phantom, and its Memory Bandwidth squeaks ahead of the Gigabyte flagship board by a few GB/s. On average, our IOmeter storage benchmark shows mixed results across the samples, again proving that we are often splitting hairs in these performance analyses.
Cinebench continues the tight race for all platforms, with only a 1.9 percent variance on average across the boards. Though we see some graphical trends with Compubench’s FaceDetect workload, each board today takes the lead at least once with a first-place tie between the Phantom Gaming and Aorus Xtreme.
On the application front, these Threadripper platforms continue to push the envelope in terms of completion times. The Phantom Gaming 6 performs worse on average than expected, with minor slip-ups primarily in productivity and video encoding. With that said, we’re talking seconds here, and for most uses each of these boards is effectively on-par with the others.
Switching gears to the graphical workloads turns the tables, as the X399M decides to turn it on with the Skydiver set and pull favorable results in Firestrike and Firestrike Extreme. The Phantom Gaming manages to stay in the middle of the field, which proves that value boards are more than capable of handling gaming workloads with this equipped GTX 1080 GPU.
After clocking out from our 9-5, turning on our gaming benchmarks continues to show similarly mixed results for each of the samples here. Simulating the coming AI apocalypse, Ashes of the Singularity Escalation shows our test sample performing better with the increased graphical settings at each of the tested resolutions. Though it lags at 1080p, the Phantom Gaming 6 manages to pull ahead at UHD.
F1 2015 is old at this point, but it continues to produce high framerates on our test platform, and at 4K the ASRock samples manage first- and third-place finishes for the X399M and Phantom Gaming 6, respectively. Our Gigabyte X399 Gaming 7 1080p data is strikingly larger than our trio of more recently tested boards, so we’re going to throw that out in comparisons today.
Metro Last Light has shown excellent scaling in the past in our testing and again shows impressive results all the way to 4K and Very High settings. The Gigabyte X399 Aorus Gaming 7 appears to show some impressive numbers at 1080p, but both ASRock boards make their way back into the spotlight at the higher resolution.
The Talos Principle continues to not stress our GTX 1080, and the Gigabyte X399 Aorus Gaming 7 takes the win at both resolutions and detail settings. Interestingly enough, the X399 boards from ASRock manage to pull ahead of the Gigabyte.
Summing up all of our metrics, we see that each board manages to score above average on at least one metric across our tests today. Even though the Gigabyte X399 Aorus Gaming 7 scored well in games, its synthetic and application performance land it about in the middle. Interestingly, both ASRock boards scored above 100 percent on the combined metrics, with the X399M managing above-average metrics in all categories. The field is tight, so let’s talk power and thermals.
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