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
CPU Performance
Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, memory subtimings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.
For reference, the X99 Extreme11 does implement MultiCore Turbo on the M1.01A BIOS we used.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link
Similarly to WinRAR, the FastStone test us updated for 2014 to the latest version. FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and thus single threaded performance is often the winner.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. The principle today is still the same, primarily as an output for H.264 + AAC/MP3 audio within an MKV container. In our test we use the same videos as in the Xilisoft test, and results are given in frames per second.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
58 Comments
View All Comments
jasica - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
as a professionally i agreed with duploxxx there are no reason to buy this board. because every one is not like gaming !<a href="http://www.topmediabox.com/">Real TV</a>
Native7i - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
I expected more USB ports at rear panelSaelnaydar - Friday, May 15, 2015 - link
Hello,Not all sorage ports are usable the way you want or the way you think, raids ports are only bound to one part of connectors.
If you are using SATA-M2 cards, the connectivity shares bandwith with some ports and you have to figure out what are unshared ports that supports raids
SSD should be bound to some special ports and not shared with M2, raids .. Wiring setup and nightmare...the storage part is not as easy at it sounds.
More importantly for a 700 Euro card !
The 3 Way SLI Does not work out of the box, a big drawback for a 4X16x 3.0 PCIE Motherboard with 2 build in chipsets supporting up to 4XSLI
I finaly made it to 3 ways SLI
First 3 way it was buggy and achieved lesser performance than 2 Way SLI
With a lot of cards switch and testings i finaly "as a last option" updated BIOS to 1.2 (wich was not there in january whan i bought the MB)
The Bios flash to 1.2 of my Asrock X99 Extreme 11 made work the 3 ways SLI configuration.
There was no indication on forums or in bios update or release notes that the bios was fixing SLI but IT does for me.
afbfxt - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I promise this will be good and I guarantee you cant make this stuff up.The ASRock X99 Extreme11 advertizes itself as a MOBO that has 8 SAS-3 ports on it. However the SAS-3 ports are the same form factor as a seven-pin SATA connector. In the MOBO manual it states "For connecting SAS HDDs, please contact SAS data cable dealers" because ASRock does not include the SAS-3 cables necessary. So I contacted all the SAS-3 cable manufactures in the USA and they all said they have never heard of a SAS-3 cable that had a SFF-8482 connector on one end and a seven-pin SATA connector on the other end that supports 12 GB/s. So I e-mailed ASRock support and asked them if they knew where I could get a SAS-3 cable like this and they never responded. So I did a Google search to see if anyone was having the same problem and I found one other person that was. The whole reason why ASRock is charging over 600.00 dollars for this board is because it offers an LSI SAS 3008 SCSI controller on board but obviously it's completely useless, so they're just ripping you off.
At first I was extremely angry but after a few days I found this whole incident to be hilarious.
I mean, can you imagine a company doing something like this. LOL!!!!!!!!!
I would never buy anything from ASRock ever again and I don't recommend anybody buying anything from them either. I will stick with and recommend to others more reputable brands like ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI etc.
petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
Did you try using regular SATA cable and power connector from your power supply ? You won't get far if you wish to use SFF-8482 ....afbfxt - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I promise this will be good and I guarantee you cant make this stuff up.The ASRock X99 Extreme11 advertizes itself as a MOBO that has 8 SAS-3 ports on it. However the SAS-3 ports are the same form factor as a seven-pin SATA connector. In the MOBO manual it states "For connecting SAS HDDs, please contact SAS data cable dealers" because ASRock does not include the SAS-3 cables necessary. So I contacted all the SAS-3 cable manufactures in the USA and they all said they have never heard of a SAS-3 cable that had a SFF-8482 connector on one end and a seven-pin SATA connector on the other end that supports 12 GB/s. So I e-mailed ASRock support and asked them if they knew where I could get a SAS-3 cable like this and they never responded. So I did a Google search to see if anyone was having the same problem and I found one other person that was. The whole reason why ASRock is charging over 600.00 dollars for this board is because it offers an LSI SAS 3008 SCSI controller on board but obviously it's completely useless, so they're just ripping you off.
At first I was extremely angry but after a few days (and my RMA approval) I found this whole incident to be hilarious. I mean, can you imagine a company doing something like this. LOL!!!!!!!!!
I would never buy anything from ASRock ever again and I don't recommend anybody buying anything from them either. I will stick with and recommend to others more reputable brands like ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI etc.
petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
No it's not rip off. each plx has price of 60 usd (you can find this on web), SAS controller that one would buy as PCIe card is aprox 300, meanis you pay 420 usd here just for good SAS implementation (meaning you need PLX or you can't run dual graphic card setup without PLX - don't forget that SAS takes 4 lanes).Yes board could be cheaper, but it's a product for narrow audience... they have to compensate. ASUS WS, Gigabyte also use PLX, you can see how prices increase rapidly when they provide PLXes ...
There is no way out wihout PLX if you want SAS and multi graphic card setup.
d_sing - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Does anyone know if this board will support 8TB HDDs on all 18 ports at once? (i.e. 18 x 8TB = 144TB) Considering this board for a server build...