Performance: Part 2
Storage tests look pretty good. There were no issues with bandwidth
SATA performance is about as high as on Intel motherboards. ASRock X299 could make about 2MB/s more but I don’t think it’s important for anyone. 563MB/s is simply a great result for SATA SSD.
About the same story is in USB 3.0/3.1 performance. Our drive could reach 402MB/s while on the X299 maximum was about 407MB/s. It’s related to AMD chipset which used to be a bit slower than Intel in these operations. ASRock made a good job and I wouldn’t count on much more.
One thing which makes me happy is the fact that on the X399M Taichi we can set RAID on 3 M.2 NVMe SSD without any issues. It’s maybe not really easy as it’s required to set a couple of things in BIOS but if you stick to ASRock manual then it will take only couple of minutes.
We were able to set RAID0 using two Patriot Hellfire 240GB NVMe drives. Below you can see AMD RAIDXpert2 window (Windows 10) and next are our results in benchmarks.
ATTO is showing about as high read bandwidth as it’s possible on our drives. The same maximum bandwidth we could see on the X299 Taichi XE motherboard some time ago.
Also, CrystalDiskMark results are high. Random 4KiB Q1T1 is not the best because of used drives but sequential bandwidth is at a respectable level.
At the end 3DMark and VRMark so quite demanding 3D benchmarks.
Results in both benchmarks are a bit worse than these on Intel i9-7900X and ASRock X299 motherboards but there is nothing to complain about. Actually, results on Intel processors are always better so I was more surprised that our scores on the 1920X and ASRock X399M Taichi are so good.
In 3DMark Time Spy and VRMark, results are about 100 points lower than on mentioned Intel. I think it’s not so big difference and no matter how we compare it, it’s excellent performance.
I have to add that AMD Threadripper platform would be also much cheaper because of processor price which recently was lowered. Also, stores like Amazon may sell them even cheaper, especially when you sign for free 30 days of Amazon Prime (or you are using this service already).
I won’t hide that this review took much more time than it was expected. I was able to check stability and performance in various scenarios. I was really surprised how well this platform runs. Even BIOS which is in 1.00 version is fully stable and functional.
ASRock X399M Taichi is simply great motherboard which should satisfy all those who are looking for more than 8 CPU cores but still wish to have small PC.
