Performance
Performance comparison between motherboards on the same chipsets is quite pointless. If motherboard has no design issues then results should be about the same. At the beginning I will add that results on ASRock E3V5 WS are about the same as results made on the same processor and memory on ASRock Z170 OC Formula. I had no other motherboard based on Intel C232 chipset but it still proves that ASRock E3V5 WS has no design flaws that would affect performance.
Below you can see processor test made on Intel Core i5 6600K. Performance in HyperPi 32M is pretty good and there are no stability issues.
Storage test results are also good. Tests were performed on Samsung 840 Pro 128GB SSD which simply can’t perform any better. Results are similar to the best results on Z170 motherboards which I was preparing for SSD reviews earlier. I wish to see M.2 slot on the E3V5 WS. I guess that some users may miss it. However it still supports NVMe SSD and can boot from them.
USB 2.0/3.0 results are also similar to what we can see on Z170/H170 motherboards. All these motherboards share the same Intel controllers so it would be strange to see much different results.
Some more storage tests in PCMark 8. Here results are even better than we could see on desktop motherboards. Not many SATA SSD are passing 300MB/s in this test what often depends from motherboard. Samsung SSD used for this review is already older version but still is performing great on E3V5 WS.
In Work tests results are also good. There were no issues with stability or consistency of the results. All who are testing hardware in PCMark know how long and demanding are these tests.
Similar story is in Creative preset. All tests passed without issues and total score is pretty good.
The main difference between desktop motherboards make overclocking capabilities and additional features. ASRock E3V5 WS is not supporting overclocking what is related to chipset in which Intel locked that functionality. In this case we could look for a competitive product and check available features. However I can’t find similar motherboard in the competition which is targeting the same end user. Considering this fact it’s hard to find better motherboard on the market which we could use for a small workstation dedicated for content creators.
