Benchmark Results
The big difference between EVGA’s X99 Micro and X99-based full ATX boards is that this microATX version has fewer slots. That’s everything, so we don’t expect any noticeable performance changes.
Futuremark 3DMark And PCMark
Other than its odd (and strangely repeatable) bump in PCMark’s “Work” score, EVGA’s X99 Micro looks right at home among its full-sized, mid-market rivals.
SiSoftware Sandra
Though CPU test results are close to constant between all motherboard brands, each company plays with memory timings a little to push better stability and/or higher performance from its product. EVGA takes second place in Sandra's Memory Bandwidth routine, and we’ll see on our overclocking page how well it performs at the CPU’s highest 26.66x DRAM multiplier.
3D Gaming
Motherboard form factor has no effect on CPU or GPU frequency, so we shouldn’t expect any difference in gaming performance between EVGA’s X99 Micro and its full-sized rivals. The competition can support a third or fourth graphics card, but two is probably enough for most gamers.
Audio And Video Encoding
EVGA’s X99 Micro runs through our entire transcoding suite with identical performance to the average of its competition, again proving that microATX’s only limitation—slot space—has no bearing on overall performance.
Adobe Creative Suite
As with our other benchmarks, Adobe Creative Suite demonstrates that the only reason to evaluate stock performance differences between motherboards is to identify problems, and that without any problems our benchmark tests are a little dull.
Productivity
Occasional benchmarking bugs like a previously-discovered oddity in 3ds Max, provide the only relief from a benchmark set that’s intended to find configuration issues that rarely exist.
File Compression Times
EVGA’s X99 Micro runs with the best of our previously-tested full-sized boards in 7-Zip, WinRAR and WinZip. It also runs with the worst of them, but that’s only because there’s so little difference between best and worst. We simply haven’t come across a misconfigured X99-based motherboard yet.
