X299 motherboards

[Woomack]

I'm starting to wonder what are the real differences between X299 motherboards regarding OC.
ASUS has couple of motherboards which probably share the same PCB. The same layout ( except additional chips or labels ) is on TUF, Prime and Strix ( so at least 5 motherboards ). Also the same power design. On MSI and Gigabyte is the same. One PCB layout for 3-4 or more motherboards.

The main differences seem to be only in additional stuff like used LAN/Audio chips or WiFi. All motherboards seem to be working with DDR4-4000/4133, some have higher max clock but then it's marked as dual channel.

Of course there were reports about vrm overheating, hot 12V CPU cables and some other things but does it really matter at lower clocks on air/water cooling ?

ASUS TUF Mark 1 costs 50% of Prime-Deluxe in my local stores. Now what is the difference for an average overclocker ? I guess that not many forum members had a chance to test it or compare any motherboards. In the web are almost only reviews of ASUS Prime, low MSI and Gigabyte Gaming 3. Hard to compare anything.


Please move it to motherboard section

 

[EarthDog]

Ive wondered that for every single platform sans amd...lol. But know the answer...there isnt much difference at all oitsode of features, really.

 

[Woomack]

I just feel they were trying some more in the previous series.

... and thanks for moving this thread

 

[mackerel]

Just started looking at X299 myself. I could get a system on the weekend to play with. Don't need it as such, but "because I can"... like I did with the Ryzen systems. I'd really like to see how the new cache structure affects some compute tasks I do.

Sticking with Asus as the cheapest board I can find other than MSI who I wont touch on anything other than low end, the TUF mk 2 is cheapest by far. The TUF mk1 joins the Strix and Prime-A in the mid ground, with Prime-Deluxe taking top spot.

Trying to figure out differences between the TUF mk2 and the mid range now... I do note the TUF mk2 has 8+4 CPU power connectors. I don't think I have a PSU that can deliver it though, and to keep spend down I was hoping to recycle as much of the rest of the build as possible.

 

[Woomack]

Every ASUS board up to Rampage/Apex ( others are not listed ) has the same PCB layout so TUF Mk1/2, Strix, Prime/Prime Deluxe have the same 8+4 power connectors in the same places with the same 7+1 power phases. What more I just checked some OC results and one guy tested 4 different motherboards with i7 7820X and he made the highest clock in XTU on TUF. I don't think that he has more CPUs.
The same as with X99, all X299 boards are high end and the difference is mainly in add-ons as I see.
On the hwbot some guys have not much worse results on MSI XPower or Gigabyte than on ASUS Apex so I guess that even these cheaper boards will handle 8-10 cores on ambient temps up to ~4.6-4.8GHz and for short tests up to 5GHz. So about what we see in reviews around the web. Worse is that 8-10 cores already need good cooling as any OC is causing them to run above 80°C on a typical AIO.

Personally I think about TUF Mk2 because it's the cheapest board but still shares PCB and power design with Strix or Prime. It also had 5 year warranty while other ASUS boards have 3 years. I don't need WiFi and other things and I don't like that armor thingy which is on Mk1. I also wish 8+4 pin power connectors as there are rumours that on single 8 pin, cables are hot. Don't know if it's related to PSU or just high power draw but if mobo is cheap and has that, then is clearly better option for me.

If you don't have 2 power connectors for CPU then use additional molex to 4 pin cable. If you are not using many drives and/or high wattage graphics card then above average ~600W PSU will be fine.

I'm not really decided if I want to buy it as price is high. I sold X99 rig some time ago and all I have now is Ryzen in my gaming rig and Kaby in my test rig. I'm just looking for something 8 core+ that can make 4.6GHz+ in everything and looks like threadripper won't be able to do much above 4GHz while even 16 cores won't be better than higher clocked 8 cores in mixed tests/benchmarks.

Edit:
There is the same QVL memory list for all ASUS boards ( except Rampage/Apex for which there is no list at all ). Supposed to run 8 memory sticks up to 4200 on 6 core+ CPU. I wonder if they really tested it.

 

[||Console||]

Every ASUS board up to Rampage/Apex ( others are not listed ) has the same PCB layout so TUF Mk1/2, Strix, Prime/Prime Deluxe have the same 8+4 power connectors in the same places with the same 7+1 power phases. What more I just checked some OC results and one guy tested 4 different motherboards with i7 7820X and he made the highest clock in XTU on TUF. I don't think that he has more CPUs.
The same as with X99, all X299 boards are high end and the difference is mainly in add-ons as I see.
On the hwbot some guys have not much worse results on MSI XPower or Gigabyte than on ASUS Apex so I guess that even these cheaper boards will handle 8-10 cores on ambient temps up to ~4.6-4.8GHz and for short tests up to 5GHz. So about what we see in reviews around the web. Worse is that 8-10 cores already need good cooling as any OC is causing them to run above 80°C on a typical AIO.

Personally I think about TUF Mk2 because it's the cheapest board but still shares PCB and power design with Strix or Prime. It also had 5 year warranty while other ASUS boards have 3 years. I don't need WiFi and other things and I don't like that armor thingy which is on Mk1. I also wish 8+4 pin power connectors as there are rumours that on single 8 pin, cables are hot. Don't know if it's related to PSU or just high power draw but if mobo is cheap and has that, then is clearly better option for me.

If you don't have 2 power connectors for CPU then use additional molex to 4 pin cable. If you are not using many drives and/or high wattage graphics card then above average ~600W PSU will be fine.

I'm not really decided if I want to buy it as price is high. I sold X99 rig some time ago and all I have now is Ryzen in my gaming rig and Kaby in my test rig. I'm just looking for something 8 core+ that can make 4.6GHz+ in everything and looks like threadripper won't be able to do much above 4GHz while even 16 cores won't be better than higher clocked 8 cores in mixed tests/benchmarks.

Edit:
There is the same QVL memory list for all ASUS boards ( except Rampage/Apex for which there is no list at all ). Supposed to run 8 memory sticks up to 4200 on 6 core+ CPU. I wonder if they really tested it.

I know im excited to see you test it when you get it =)
We all know you are going to get one even if it gets returned .

 

[Woomack]

I will get something but don't know what. Would be much easier if I could get any review samples but motherboard vendors don't want to send anything to Poland and those who can, want everything back after tests ( too much work to make it for free ). I'm also waiting for any new memory kits and these are expensive now. My last memory review was ~2 months ago and generally there were not many of them this year
My budget is too low and in best case I can get 7820X + cheap mobo

 

[mackerel]

The TUF mk2 is a tolerable price level for me. I'm not sure I want to pay any more than that for the mid models. CPU wise I was looking at the 6 core myself. You might ask why, since I already have 6 and 8 core Ryzen systems, alongside a bunch of Intel quads, but I have been thinking about increasing CPU potential for gaming, especially for high FPS. That's 50% more cores and I hopefully am not sacrificing clocks as I would on Ryzen. The 6 core part is close in price to i7 quads, and my recent attempt at low cost 5820k fell through. If I can get away with recycle parts from other systems I could have it running on the weekend. My watercooling setup I believe supports 2011 thus 2066 also, so I could find it's limit before backing off to a day to day configuration.

I've already started dismantling my dual core systems to free up some space and parts... they seem so insignificant now that 4 core seems entry level.

 

[Woomack]

2 cores make me sad ... what's worse it's still strong standard for laptops and won't change anytime soon.
If I'm right then 2011 socket has the same mounting kit as 2066 for most coolers. If I get 2066 soon then I will install water cooling and I have new block which wasn't designed for 2066 so I hope it will fit.

Right now I have Ryzen 1700X in my gaming PC and 7700K for tests/reviews. I just wish something 8c+ and I wanted 10c but price difference is too big between only 2 cores.

Storage on TUF 2 is weird. I mean all is fine but I was wondering where is 2nd M.2 slot .... and it's vertical, near memory slots. I mean others have 2-3 M.2 slots near PCIE and ASUS couldn't find space there for 2nd slot ?

I'm also thinking about ASRock Killer AC. Costs some more but has 11 power phases and some other things like 3x M.2. I don't know if I will ever use it. I guess that I will decide when I see local prices. It will be in stock in Germany soon but not so cheap. I already see that prices in Poland are lower, especially for TUF 2 which costs about $30 less here than in Germany ( not counting shipping etc. ).

 

[mackerel]

My work supplied laptop is 2c4t part. It is pretty sluggish although the basic spec is ok. There isn't enough CPU to run all the crap, I mean, important IT management and security software that doesn't know when to stop. They did the same with my previous laptop which I got to keep on replacement. Clean install of Win7 and it flies now.

On my home systems, 2c parts made sense when I bought them when the software was single threaded. They weren't crippled by lack of ram bandwidth as a quad core would be without high end ram, so quads were actually not much faster. However a recent multi-thread update has significantly reduced the bandwidth demand and quads are better able to show their strength now.

Back on X299, it is also my understanding that 2066 is same mounting as square 2011. I'm trying to keep my spending under control... I could, doesn't mean I should. Going to try and stick to my original plan and wait for Skylake-EP and go for a bigger upgrade. I might actually get some other work done instead of building PCs

 

[wingman99]

How many phases can they fit between the memory banks on the X299 motherboard?

 

[EarthDog]

Depends on the size... clearly limited.

 

[Woomack]

I started Skylake-X tests and so far it doesn't look bad but I've noticed couple of things. Platform is 7900X/ ASUS X299 TUF Mark2.
During all benchmarks on stock clocks ( CPU still boosts to 4.5GHz ) I haven't seen more than ~50°C on VRM. However when I left PC over night testing memory stability - 6h+ AIDA64 at 95% memory load, then VRM temps went up to ~70°C. Still everything at stock without additional airflow.

Looks like this platform uses dual rank for write/copy bandwidth while it's not affecting read much. This is what I see comparing my results in AIDA64 to some other results from around the web.
The same as on previous X platforms, cache frequency affects maximum memory bandwidth. It doesn't really matter if in use is DDR4-3000 or 3600 memory, bandwidth without cache overclocking is about the same. My CPU couldn't make more than 3300MHz on auto voltages. I will check later what affects cache.

3600 17-18-18 CR2 / 2000MHz cache, result about the same as at 3000 15-16-16 / 2000MHz cache


3600 15-15-15 CR1 / 2000MHz cache


3600 15-15-15 CR1 / 3300MHz cache

 

[mackerel]

Could I request Prime95 benchmark results while you're testing ram? I'd suggest latest build of 29.1 from http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=22141 (not 29.2, as that may change FFT code depending on self benchmarks and lead to inconsistent results, at least not until I understand that new function better).

Benchmark is under options, with following options (easier than 28.xx which required editing of config files!):
Type of benchmark: throughput benchmark

min fft size: 4096
max fft size: 4096

bench using one cpu core: off
bench using all cpu cores: on
bench using remaining combos: off
benchmark HT: off

benchmark one worker case: on
benchmark max worker case: on
becnhmark ofther worker combos: off
time to run: 15s

My reasoning for this request is that I've previously seen that ram configuration certainly does affect performance, but I couldn't correlate it with synthetic measurements like aida64. What I saw on desktop CPUs was: ram speed good, dual rank better than single rank by about one speed step equivalent, latency timings only has minor influence. I need to work out later how close you are to what I consider memory bound operation.

About the settings: 4096k are pretty big FFTs, each holding 32MB of data so it will have to exercise ram heavily. One worker has all cores working on same task, max workers is one separate task per core, and represent the two typical operating conditions for this load.

While on that forum, I just saw an interesting comment:

Btw. I found today that the L3 caches on these Skylake X's is really really slow. ~150GB/s or about half the bandwidth of Haswell-E and barely 2x the memory bandwidth.

This might explain why I'm getting such poor scaling with AVX512 while still fitting in cache. The L3 is so slow that it might be worth disregarding its existence and using the L2 as the LLC as far as tuning goes. Something for me to test later...

Something to look at in more detail later.

 

[Woomack]

As you see on my screenshots, cache OC gave ~60% L3 cache bandwidth improvement. But really it looks low comparing to other L's. I guess it's because Intel reordered cache and they said something about it. I can't find this article now... I guess I could read it when I saw it L1 and L2 look fast.

IMC is much stronger than in Haswell/Broadwell-E. What can be interesting for you is that my tests were made on dual rank memory / 64GB in total and to make it run at 3600 all I had to do was to change memory multi. For some reason 3600 was really easy to set and 3733 is not booting at all. I wonder if it's something with my board or memory can't run higher. Also can't complain as it's DDR4-3000 dual rank kit.

 

[||Console||]

@ woomack you know your a memory junky when you play with the ram and cache first before playing with the cpu oc =)

Glad to you see you are getting some nice results , heres to 4000mhz + when you play with voltages

 

[Woomack]

I'm not sure if I can set this kit higher, it's 4x16GB dual rank kit. I will get new 4x8GB HyperX 3600 for review soon. Worse is that I have to return it after tests but still nice to test something new.

 

[wingman99]

I'm not sure if I can set this kit higher, it's 4x16GB dual rank kit. I will get new 4x8GB HyperX 3600 for review soon. Worse is that I have to return it after tests but still nice to test something new.

Do you have to pay for shipping when returning the memory?

 

[EarthDog]

Typically they pay for return shipping (samsung asked for some drives back for review a couple years back). Not sure how anyone else does it, but id imagine most do provide return shipping.

 

[Woomack]

yes, they always pay for shipping