The GIGABYTE X170-Extreme ECC Motherboard Review: For When Skylake Xeons need SLI and Thunderbolt 3
by Ian Cutress on October 17, 2016 2:00 PM ESTCPU 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 JEDEC (DDR4-2133 C15) for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
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. For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Ej24 - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
This is LGA1151Ej24 - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
Typically Xeons are cheaper than their i7 relatives at the same specs. But when the motherboard costs double you effectively negate any savings on the CPU, and don't gain much over the i7's in terms of chipset features. I miss the Haswell days when you could slap an lga1150 Xeon in a Z87/97 for less than an i7 and get all the consumer goodies too.Also, can someone explain why SATA Express is given PCH lanes but the regular SATA3 ports are on a ASMEDIA controller?!?! Why is SATA Express included at all anymore??? Wasn't it DOA? Has anyone ever brought a SATA Express drive to market? Has anyone ever used one? Why not free up those PCIe lanes for something useful like more PCIe expansion slots, or support for more simultaneous M.2 NVME drives?
Dahak - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
The sata express slots works as either Sata Express (taking up 2 Sata ports per 1 Sata Express connection) or as 6 sata ports. In addition to the 2 from the asmedia controllercbm80 - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
Either they are targeting a niche demo (professional 10-year olds?) or else Gigabyte's marketing is sending a mixed message.Jacerie - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
"For the money, GIGABYTE offers plausibly the consumer board with the highest specifications cable of supporting E3-1200 v5 Xeons..."Shouldn't that read... highest specifications capapble?
Gigaplex - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Not unless you want to include typos.sor - Sunday, October 23, 2016 - link
Kind of lame that the article says ECC about 100 times, it's a major selling point of the platform, and I can't seem to find anywhere in the article where they actually benchmark with ECC memory. This is sort of like the time when they reviewed the quad SLI motherboard without actually trying quad SLI on it, although there was a much bigger uproar.Zan Lynx - Saturday, October 29, 2016 - link
The last time I ran some casual tests, ECC RAM of the same speed rating produced the same GB/s as non-ECC. Within the margin of error. The issue might be that you can't really find ECC RAM rated for higher speeds with XMP profiles.sor - Monday, October 31, 2016 - link
Yeah, that's part of the point. It would highlight that you're probably going to get a bit lower performance from this board if you're caring about its primary feature enough to equip the namesake RAM. Instead they stuck to components that make it swappable with a much cheaper board.imisdjsd - Tuesday, November 8, 2016 - link
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