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How We Test

Additional cores create additional thermal and power loads that can push other hardware to its limits, yet the parts we’re hoping to push to the limit are all on the motherboards. Intel’s 10-core, 20-thread Core i9-7900X CPU is a great product for stressing the voltage regulators of various X299 motherboards, particularly under our full-AVX-load overclocking stability test.

Test Hardware

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Sound	Integrated HD Audio
Network	Integrated Gigabit Networking
Graphics Driver	GeForce 382.53

The tremendous heat produced by the Core i9-7900X required us to use nothing less than our award-winning Fractal Design S24 liquid cooler system sample. Getting its fans to blow sufficiently over each motherboard’s voltage regulator required additional design considerations: Of our leftover case review samples, Cooler Master’s HAF-XB had the best layout.

Comparison Products

ASRock Fatal1ty X299 Professional Gaming i9

ASRock X299 Taichi

MSI X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC

Benchmark Settings

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Synthetic Benchmarks & Settings
PCMark 8	Version 2.7.613Home, Creative, Work, Storage, Applications (Adobe & Microsoft)
3DMark 13	Version 4.47.597.0Skydiver, Firestrike, Firestrike Extreme Default Presets
SiSoftware Sandra	Version 2016.03.22.21CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cryptography, Memory Bandwidth
DiskSPD	4k Random Read, 4k Random Write128k Sequential Read, 128k Sequential Write
Cinebench R15	Build RC83328DEMOOpenGL Benchmark
CompuBench	Version 1.5.8Face Detection, Optical Flow, Ocean Surface, Ray Tracing
Application Tests & Settings
LAME MP3	Version 3.98.3Mixed 271MB WAV to mp3: Command: -b 160 --nores (160 Kb/s)
HandBrake CLI	Version: 0.9.9Sintel Open Movie Project: 4.19 GB 4k mkv to x265 mp4
Blender	Version 2.68aBMW 27 CPU Render Benchmark, BMW 27 GPU Render Benchmark
7-Zip	Version 16.02THG-Workload (7.6 GB) to .7z, command line switches "a -t7z -r -m0=LZMA2 -mx=9"
Adobe After Effects CC	Release 2015.3.0, Version 13.8.0.144PCMark driven routine
Adobe Photoshop CC	Release 2015.5.0. 20160603.r.88 x64PCMark driven routine (light and heavy)
Adobe InDesign CC	Release 2015.4, Build 11.4.0.90 x64PCMark driven routine
Adobe Illustrator	Release 2015.3.0, Version 20.0.0 (64-bit)PCMark driven routine
Game Tests & Settings
Ashes of Singularity	Version 1.31.21360High Preset - 1920x1080, Mid Shadow Quality, 1x MSAACrazy Preset - 1920x1090, High Shadow Quality, 2x MSAA
F1 2015	2015 Season, Abu Dhabi Track, RainMedium Preset, No AFxUltra High Preset, 16x AF
Metro Last Light Redux	Version 3.00 x64High Quality, 1920x1080, High Tesselation, 16x AFVery High Quality, 1920x1080, Very High Tesselation, 16x AF
The Talos Principle	Version 267252Medium Preset, High Quality, High Tesselation, 4x AFUltra Preset, VeryHigh Quality, VeryHigh Tesselation, 16x AF