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At default DDR4-3600 settings, the Gigabyte X299X Designare 10G’s memory bandwidth edges past ASRock’s X299 Taichi CLX. It’s also a little quicker in Sandra Memory Latency.
Both boards trade blows in most of our 3DMark and PCMark tests, but the X299X Designare 10G faces losses in Application Startup and MS Office that are noteworthy because these two tests are the only synthetics used in our overall performance calculations.
3D Games
The X299X Designare 10G wins some and loses some in games, and finishes the set insignificantly behind on-average.
Mixed Workloads
Less completion time equates to more performance in timed tests, and even though the X299X Designare 10G’s win is tiny, it’s still going to contribute to the overall performance profile used in efficiency and value calculations.
Power, Heat and Efficiency
Despite its larger feature set, the X299X Designare 10G consumes fewer watts than the X299 Taichi CLX.
And, despite its lower power consumption, the X299X Designare 10G appears to run much hotter than the X299 Taichi CLX. The hotter temperature was still low enough to allow an overclock equal to that of the Taichi CLX.
Overall performance for the X299X Designare 10G is less than 1% short of the X299 Taichi CLX.
Comparing the power saved to the performance lost, the X299X Designare 10G beats its ASRock rival by 2% in efficiency.
Final Analysis
The X299X Designare 10G costs quite a bit more than the X299X Taichi, so it’s sure to fall behind in a comparison of performance to price.
From the perspective of features, however, the X299X Designare 10G is a clear winner. At current prices, its dual-port 10Gbps network controller is worth its price premium over ASRock’s X299 Taichi CLX. The X299X Designare 10G also includes dual Thunderbolt 3 ports that share its single controller’s 40Gbps bandwidth. And that controller is even given two DisplayPort inputs for Thunderbolt 3 video pass through from the builder’s choice of discrete graphics card.
X299X Designare 10G buyers also get the firm’s PCIe Gen4 M.2 to x16 slot adapter. We have mixed feelings about the value of this part when placed in the kit of a PCie Gen3-platform motherboard, particularly when it needs an x16 slot to feed four M.2 drives. The Gen4 feature is lost, and dual graphics card installations will typically force the builder to put the expander card in an x8 slot with only one or two of its M.2 slots active. We generally favor more drives when given the choice between dual graphics cards or single graphics with multiple M.2 drives, but you might not.
Then again, you could always sell the “freebie” expansion card to a TRX40 Aorus Master owner, since that platform actually has the PCIe 4.0 interface to take full advantage of the card.
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