ASRock X99E-ITX/ac Review

X99 Motherboard Group test: Test Setup

We use the same hardware to test all LGA2011-v3 motherboards. Due to the GPU-limited nature of many of today's games, we now use two AMD R9 290 graphics cards to allow CPU performance, in particular once it's overclocked, to come into play. However, as the X99E-ITX/ac only has one PCI-E slot, there's little point running our game tests as all the other X99 board results used two R9 290s. Therefore we've focussed on 2D tests for this review, along but used our usual Intel Core i7-5960X.

• 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2,666MHz DDR4 RAM
  
• Intel Core i7-5960X
  
• 2 x XFX R9 290 Double Dissipation Edition
  
• 512GB Crucial MX100 SSD, Samsung 850 Pro, Plextor M.2 PX-G256M6e (SATA 6Gbps speed tests)
  
• Corsair H100i cooler
  
• Corsair AX860i PSU
  
• Windows 7 SP1

Thanks to Corsair for supplying the PSU, memory and CPU cooler, to Crucial and Samsung for the SSDs, to Intel for the CPU and to XFX for the graphics cards. Also, we'd like to thank ASRock for providing our review sample.

Tests:

• PCMark 8 Video 4K encoding
  
• PCMark 8 Photo Editing
  
• Cinebench R15
  
• Terragen 3
  
• SATA 6Gbps and M.2
  
• Rightmark Audio Analyser
  
• Power consumption