ASRock X299E-ITX/ac Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging and Bundle3. Board Layout and Features4. Bitspower Water Block and G.Skill Ripjaws SO-DIMMs5. UEFI6. Software7. Testing Methodology8. Tests: CPU Related9. Tests: Memory Related10. Tests: Gaming Related11. Tests: Motherboard Features Performance12. Overclocking & Power Consumption13. Closing Thoughts14. View All Pages

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark is a Windows-based utility for testing storage performance of any storage drive or controller. We use the default benchmark setup.

M.2 PCIe Performance

For M.2 testing we use a Toshiba OCZ RD400 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD.

The ASRock X299E-ITX/ac is a compact board with no M.2 cooling solution (and no space for one either!) so we weren't surprised to see thermal throttling happening on the first ATTO run. Users will need to find a case with good airflow or could try and mount some kind of M.2 cooling solution to the rear M.2 slots where there may be more space to play with, depending on the case choice.

USB Performance

We test USB 3.0 and 3.1 performance using a pair of Transcend SSD370S 512GB SSDs in RAID 0 connected to an Icy Box RD2253-U31 2-bay USB 3.1 enclosure powered by an ASMedia ASM1352R controller.

USB 3.0 and 3.1 performance was as fast as it gets.

SATA 6Gbps Performance

For SATA 6Gbps testing we use an OCZ Trion 150 480GB SSD.

SATA performance was typical of the X299 chipset.

Audio

Rightmark Audio Analyser is a freeware benchmarking utility designed to objectively test the performance characteristics of audio solutions. We setup a line-in line-out loop and execute the record/playback test before generating the results report you see below. A sampling mode of 24-bit, 192 kHz is tested where available. If unavailable the closest alternative operating mode available is used and clearly marked.

Audio performance was a roughly in line with rivals: six Excellent, one Very Good and one Good for an overall result of Very Good. Most X299 motherboards tested have scored Very Good but the ASRock X299 Taichi XE did score Excellent overall so perhaps the size constraint has cost this ITX board ever so slightly in synthetic audio performance. In the real world users may not notice any difference, we certainly didn't in our subjective audio tests.

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