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Synthetic Benchmarks
Synthetic benchmarks are a great way to find configuration problems like unrequested overclocks (which wreck a head-to-head match) and configuration issues (which can slow down certain components). In this case, we can see that the X99E-ITX/ac’s 3DMark 11 scores suffer slightly compared to larger motherboards, but we don’t see the cause until we get towards the end of our synthetic test.
Scrolling through to the sixth image, we see a 36% performance deficit in Sandra's Cryptography module, and the next image reveals the reason: the X99E-ITX/ac interfaces only two of the platform’s four memory channels. Bandwidth drops by slightly less than half, but will we see any big differences in real-world applications?
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