The EVGA X299 FTW K Motherboard Review: Dual U.2 Ports
by Joe Shields on January 29, 2018 8:45 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Killer
- EVGA
- X299
- Basin Falls
- Skylake-X
- Kaby Lake-X
CPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at the CPU manufacturer's recommended frequency (with JEDEC sub-timings) for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Rendering - Blender 2.78: link
For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.
For our Blender testing, the FTW K landed in the middle of the pack group. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, 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.
POV-Ray results show the FTW K coming in last. The difference here we found during our sanity checks was to see the CPU running at its base clock of 3.3 GHz throughout this testing. Most of the CPUs run from 3.6-3.7 GHz in this test, and it comes down to EVGA's automatic -3 AVX offset which cannot be removed.
Compression – WinRAR 5.4: 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.
WinRAR results place the FTW K the slowest of the bunch here at 38.7 seconds.
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.
7-Zip results have the EVGA board right in the middle of the very tightly packed group. No anomolies here.
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 win 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.
The 3DPM results were also positive coming in second place leading a tight group results behind it.
Neuron Simulation - DigiCortex v1.20: link
The newest benchmark in our suite is DigiCortex, a simulation of biologically plausible neural network circuits, and simulates activity of neurons and synapses. DigiCortex relies heavily on a mix of DRAM speed and computational throughput, indicating that systems which apply memory profiles properly should benefit and those that play fast and loose with overclocking settings might get some extra speed up. Results are taken during the steady state period in a 32k neuron simulation and represented as a function of the ability to simulate in real time (1.000x equals real-time).
In the DigiCortex testing, the FTW K managed 1.14 score which is towards the lower end of our results. but still within a few percentage points of the top result.
23 Comments
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jordanclock - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
Any chance we could see comparison numbers on the Intel and Killer NICs?Flunk - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
There is almost no difference, type "intel vs killer nic" into Google. It's been done to death.jordanclock - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
By that logic, they shouldn't bother including half their benchmarks for motherboards because they are almost always to same for a given chipset.My interest is in this particular motherboards implementation of the dual NICs.
Ian Cutress - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
Aside from doing a peak throughput test, we're looking into doing something more substantial for NIC testing. Still a WIPjordanclock - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
Awesome! Glad you're looking to do something more meaningful than peak throughput. It's kind of like the average FPS of networking, in that it gets a lot of attention but isn't the most useful number.ImSpartacus - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
Whew, I'm glad there's finally a mobo with two u.2 ports.It's so annoying to have all of these u.2 drives without the ability to use more than one at a time!
bug77 - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
Ha, I was just thinking the same thing when I read the article :PYuriman - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
Maybe it's just me, but I find those heatsinks pretty ugly.JoeyJoJo123 - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
It's supposed to align with their For The Win 3 (FTW3) series video cards styling.http://hexus.net/media/uploaded/2017/5/9656d308-25...
It's no different than MSI doing a similar red/black dragon scheme that they've done with their video cards to their motherboards.
bug77 - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
I find this type of comment pretty useless.No one design choice will ever appeal to everyone. And a chameleonic or customizable look hasn't been done yet, so that comment really brings nothing to the discussion.
It's ok to point out fugly board, so the manufacturer knows not to do that again, but that's far from the case here.