How We Test
For this article, we’ve let the Corsair H110i take a breather to run some different heatsink solutions through their paces. We had very good success with the Noctua NH-D15 SE-AM4, so we thought we'd give its little brother, the NH-U12S SE-AM4, a shot. Being roughly half the size of its larger sibling, we hope that it can still perform adequately enough on our test processor. With its reduced size, we also gain visibility to more motherboard planar and thus, more RGBness from the G.Skill Trident-Z kits.
The HyperX kits are our primary test vehicle this time because for some reason we could not run DDR4-2400 on this board with both Trident-Z kits installed. Regardless, both kits get adequate testing in this review. The “Tumbler” is still our enclosed test rig, hosting our GTX 970 GPU, OCZ RD400 M.2 drive, Corsair AX860 PSU, and various other drives.
Test System Configuration
| Sound | Integrated HD Audio |
|---|---|
| Network | Integrated Gigabit Networking |
| Graphics | NVIDIA |
| Chipset | AMD X370 |
Benchmark Settings
| Synthetic Benchmarks and Settings | |
|---|---|
| PCMark 8 | Version 2.7.613 Home, Creative, Work, Storage, Applications (Adobe & Microsoft) |
| SiSoftware Sandra | Version 2016.03.22.21 CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cryptography Memory Bandwidth |
| DiskSPD | 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 and 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 | Version 1.31.21360 High Preset - 1920x1080, Mid Shadow Quality, 1x MSAA Crazy Preset - 1920x1090, High Shadow Quality, 2x MSAA High Preset - 3460x1920, Mid Shadow Quality, 1x MSAA Crazy Preset - 3460x1920, High Shadow Quality, 2x MSAA |
| F1 2015 | 2015 Season, Abu Dhabi Track, Rain 1920x1080 - UltraHigh Preset, 16x AF 3460x1920 - 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, 3460x1920, High Tesselation Very High Quality, 3460x1920, 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 3460x1920 - Medium Preset, High Quality, High Tesselation, 4x AF 3460x1920 - Ultra Preset, VeryHigh Quality, VeryHigh Tesselation, 16x AF |
Comparison Units
ASRock X370 Gaming K4
ASRock X370 Taichi
MSI X370 Krait Gaming
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