Performance
Performance has been tested in a small ITX PC which contains the i7-8086K processor, 16GB HyperX Predator DDR4-4000, GTX1070 FE graphics card, Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe SSD, Crucial P1 1TB NVMe SSD, HyperX Savage 240GB SATA SSD and Enermax Revolution SFX 650W PSU.
Here are a couple photos of the test rig.
Additional tests like CPU overclocking were out of the case with Enermax LIQFUSION 240 AIO cooling.
ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac is letting to set the highest memory frequency from all ASRock motherboards based on the Z390 chipset. Actually, it works as declared so we can easily set DDR4-4500 as long as memory is able to run at so high speed. Below we can see two results at XMP settings of HyperX Predator RGB DDR4-4000 CL19 kit and the same memory at manual settings and higher voltage.
Results as about as high as we can expect on a quad channel setup.
I have to add that DDR4-4500 is so far maximum frequency but fully stable. I expect to see higher results on future BIOS releases.
Also 7-Zip result was made on a DDR4-4500 memory. It’s quite demanding benchmark which shows no issues with stability or performance on our test platform.
Results in rendering and mixed workload which brings PCMark 10 are also great. Probably the best we’ve seen on a 6-core platform.
Now let’s take a look at the storage benchmarks. Below we can see CrystalDiskMark in the latest version.
The first result is showing us a performance on Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe SSD. The result is a bit higher than expected. On many motherboards, maximum bandwidth is slightly below declared speed so we are glad to see high results on the Z390 PG-ITX/ac motherboard.
The second result is based on Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB SATA SSD. It’s typical SATA drive which offers high sequential bandwidth so is good to test how SATA controller performs. As expected, results are high but at least in case of motherboards with Intel controllers, we can see similar results regardless of motherboard series. Pretty much the same results are on every ASRock motherboard tested in our redaction in last year.
The last result is network bandwidth. This result is highly affected by storage speed and all additional operations that the system performs. Depends on the run, results in random operations are different but what is the most important, LAN controller on the Z390 PG-ITX/ac can reach the maximum bandwidth of the local network.
PCMark 8 has maybe not the latest but still great storage benchmark which is showing us performance in popular applications and less demanding games. Below are two results. The first is Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD and the second one is Kingston HyperX Savage SATA SSD. Both results are good considering used interface.
