The ASRock X99 Extreme11 Review: Eighteen SATA Ports with Haswell-E
by Ian Cutress on March 11, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Storage
- ASRock
- X99
- LGA2011-3
Gaming Performance on GTX 770s
F1 2013
First up is F1 2013 by Codemasters. I am a big Formula 1 fan in my spare time, and nothing makes me happier than carving up the field in a Caterham, waving to the Red Bulls as I drive by (because I play on easy and take shortcuts). F1 2013 uses the EGO Engine, and like other Codemasters games ends up being very playable on old hardware quite easily. In order to beef up the benchmark a bit, we devised the following scenario for the benchmark mode: one lap of Spa-Francorchamps in the heavy wet, the benchmark follows Jenson Button in the McLaren who starts on the grid in 22nd place, with the field made up of 11 Williams cars, 5 Marussia and 5 Caterham in that order. This puts emphasis on the CPU to handle the AI in the wet, and allows for a good amount of overtaking during the automated benchmark. We test at 1920x1080 on Ultra graphical settings.
Bioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite was Zero Punctuation’s Game of the Year for 2013, uses the Unreal Engine 3, and is designed to scale with both cores and graphical prowess. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
Tomb Raider
The next benchmark in our test is Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider is an AMD optimized game, lauded for its use of TressFX creating dynamic hair to increase the immersion in game. Tomb Raider uses a modified version of the Crystal Engine, and enjoys raw horsepower. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
Sleeping Dogs
Sleeping Dogs is a benchmarking wet dream – a highly complex benchmark that can bring the toughest setup and high resolutions down into single figures. Having an extreme SSAO setting can do that, but at the right settings Sleeping Dogs is highly playable and enjoyable. We run the basic benchmark program laid out in the Adrenaline benchmark tool, and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
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lordken - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
Rather you should apology for being lazy. abufrejoval did run some math for you, so its pretty clear that all 18x ports wont deliver full bandwidth. If you need to run 18x SSD at full speed then you probably need server board or something.If you want to troll go elsewhere.
petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
abufrejoval is not theoretical - 1 SSD on PCH can do 400Mb/s, but 4 SSDs simultaneously can give less 100MB/s transfer each. Now move that on SAS controller and each SSD gives 400MB/s.Once you start using SSDs on SAS - you will never go back to PCH.
I posted article a year ago on the web showing differences I have measured with crystal benchmark - values are shocking... measurements were based on ASRock X79 Extreme11, same SAS controller just CPU and RAM bit slower.
wyewye - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Good point duploxxx.I haven't seen a professionally done review on this site for quite a while.
petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
Motherboard has nothing to do with gaming, go for ROG if you wish gaming. Business use, rendering, 3D where storage needs to be fast and has to be SAS.We are using older generation of the board X79 with PLX and SAS controller. There are no words nor space here to explain you what performance increase we we hook up 8 SSDs (960G) on SAS instead of Intel...
It's perfect for virtualization on or cloud realization - example: 128GB RAM + 6T SSDs can accomodate more than 20 vmware images, each with 4GB ram, running perfectly on Xeon.
@dicobalt - keeping porn ? it's so sad ppl think no further than gaming and watching tv. go buy book and learn something... mathlab, 3d studio and earn money. actually get a tv and watch porn there.
3DoubleD - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
Thanks for the review! This board is incredible. I run a storage server with a software raid (Unraid) and this board alone would handle all of my SATA port needs without the need for any PCIe SATA cards. The only issue is the price though. For $600 I could easily buy a $150 Z97 motherboard with 8 SATA ports and two PCIe 8x slots, buy two $150 PCIe 2.0 8x cards (each with 8 SATAIII ports), and I'd still have money left over (probably put it towards a better case!). Also, that's not counting the significant difference in CPU and DDR4 costs.Clearly this motherboard is meant for a use case beyond a simple storage server (so many PCIe 8x slots!), so I can't say they missed their intended mark. However, I really wish they could attempt something like this on the Z97 platform, more than 10 SATA ports but with no more than two (or three) PCIe 8x slots (even if some of them are 4x). Aim for a price below $250.
I can't pretend it would be a big seller, but I know I'd buy one!
WithoutWeakness - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
ASRock has the Z87 Extreme11 with 22 SATA III ports (6 from chipset, 16 from LSI controller) along with 4-way SLI support (x8,x8,x8,x8) and a pair of Thunderbolt 2 ports. I'm not sure how feasible it is to plan on using all of those with only 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes from the socket 1150 CPU but it sounds like everything you're asking for. Unfortunately it came in over $500, double your asking price.I think you'll be hard pressed to get what you're looking for at that $250 mark, especially on a Z97 board. Socket 1150 CPUs only have 16 lanes and every manufacturer who is willing to put an 8+ port RAID controller on board will also want a PLX PCIe bridge chip to avoid choking other PCIe devices (GPU's, M.2 drives, etc). The RAID chip alone would bring a $100 motherboard into the $200+ range and adding the PLX chip would likely bring it to $250+. At that point every manufacturer is going to look at a board with 14+ SATA ports, a PLX chip, and a Z97 chipset and say "lets sell it to gamers" and slap on some monster VRM setup, additional USB 3.0 ports, 4 PCIe 16x lanes, bake in some margin, and sell it for $400+.
3DoubleD - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Makes sense. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it. Not sure why I've never come across this board, doesn't seem like it is sold at any of the common outlets I shop at (Newegg.ca, ect.). Still, going the add-in SATA cards seems to be the more economical way.wintermute000 - Sunday, March 15, 2015 - link
You wouldn't have ECC with Z97.Maybe unraid is better than ZFS/BTRFS but I still wouldn't roll with that much storage on a software solution (vs HW RAID) without ECC.
Vorl - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
This is such a strange board. with 18 SATA connections, the first thing everyone will think is "storage server". if all 18 ports were handled with the same high end RAID controller then the $600 price tag would make sense. As it is, this system is just a confused jumble of parts slapped together.Who needs 4 PCIE x16 slots on a storage server? That is an expense for no reason.
Who needs 18 SATA connections that are all mixed around on different controllers that can't all be hardware raided together? Sure, you can run software raid, but for $600 you can buy a nice raid card, and sas to sata breakout cards and cables, and still be ahead due to full hardware performance with cache.
Also, for a server, why would they not have the IGP port? I may be missing something, but I thought they CPU has integrated graphics.
Just not an awesome setup from what I can tell.
So.. why bother having all those sata ports if they aren't all tied to RAID?
They add an LSI controller, and that isn't even what handles RAID on the system.
1nf1d3l - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
LGA2011 processors do not have integrated graphics.