The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
SYSTEM BUILD
This wasn’t a totally new build as we simply migrated our Windows 8.1 system, switched off our ASRock X99 OC Formula for the Extreme11, installing the Intel Core i7-5960x chip, rebooted and we were off to the races. Initial testing once again displayed lower storage benchmarks than we were happy with so we spent the weekend re-building and optimizing this Test Bench one tweak at a time, following our SSD Optimization Guide of course! Very impressive was the fact that, as we were still relying on our Intel P3700 NVMe SSD for our boot drive, it was recognized immediately and this fresh OS was probably the fastest and easiest to date.
This is a brand new test bench and, as such, we would love to thank those who jumped in specifically to help the cause. Key contributors to this build are our friends at ASRock, Corsair, Kingston with components from past contributors to include In-Win, EVGA, beQuiet, HGST , Samsung, and QNIX. We have detailed all components in the table below and they are all linked should you wish to make a duplicate our system as so many seem to do, or check out the price of any soul component. As always, we appreciate your support in any purchase though our links!
SYSTEM COMPONENTS
This Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to the below mentioned manufacturers for their support in our project. Our choice of components is very narrow, in that, we choose only what we believe to be among the best available and links are provided to each that will assist in hardware pricing and availability, should the reader be interested in purchase.
| PC CHASSIS: | InWin D-Frame Open Air Chassis |
| MOTHERBOARD: | ASRock X99 Extreme11 Socket LGA 2011-3 |
| CPU: | Intel Haswell-E Core i7 5960X |
| CPU COOLER: | Corsair Hydro Series H105 Extreme Water Cooled |
| POWER SUPPLY: | be quiet Dark Power Pro 10 1000W PSU |
| SYSTEM COOLING: | be quiet Silent Wings 2 PC Fans |
| GRAPHICS CARD: | EVGA GTX 770 Superclocked with ACX Cooler |
| MEMORY: | Kingston HyperX Predator DDR4 |
| KEYBOARD: | Corsair Vengeance K95 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard |
| MOUSE: | Corsair Vengeance M95 MMO/RTS Laser Mouse |
| MONITOR: | QNIX 27″ QX2710 2560×1440 |
| SYSTEM SSD | INTEL P3700 800GB NVME SSD |
UNDERSTANDING THE X99
If there is something we have learned about the X99 chipset, it is that it can be finicky. We have been fortunate to overclock comfortably at 4.5Ghz and also push our DDR4 memory to 2666MHz, but things differ from board to board, and especially when you start pushing storage. For example, we easily set the CPU at 4.5Ghz and memory at 2666MHz with the OC Formula, but the Extreme11 took a bit more work to get them settled, and then that went to pot when we threw in the NVMe card, 8 SAS drives, 2x M.2 and a few notebook SSDs. Unlike the Z97 chipset, and Z87 before it, the X99 seems to want you to pick your strength. Do you want to OC the CPU or memory?
Overclocking to 4.5Ghz, however, was a piece of cake. Simply enter the UEFI, enter ‘Load Optimized CPU Settings’, click on Turbo 4.5Ghz and reboot. We might suggest not trying this without great CPU cooling such as that of the Corsair Hydro Series 105 Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler that we use. Once our overclocking was set, we took a crack at the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility and were able to reach 2284 points.
Below, we have included the full battery of CPU-Z identifying benchmarks. Click on any of our pictures for a much larger and clearer result.
3D MARK – SKYDIVER
PCMARK 8 – CREATIVITY
This board is heavy on the “drool” factor!!
It doesn’t have 4×16 SLI. That is a marketing ploy/lie (at least in that context). Those PLX chips are useless in that scenario. They are only useful when your PCI-E cards aren’t all going to be in use at the same time. They are much more useful for storage than graphics.
You might want to take a look at the ASRock video that tests it. Perhaps we should have posted it.
It’s worth mentioning that with graphics 4×16 PCI-E 3.0 doesn’t really make much of a difference anyway, as graphics cards won’t use all of the bandwidth, especially when you consider how poorly 4-way SLI/CrossFireX scales in comparison to 2, or even 3-way.
The 4×16 is absolutely much more of a factor in terms of storage than graphics, but that has little do to with whether or not the board can actually utilize the function across four graphics cards simultaneously .
compared to striker 2 extreme this is nothing
X99? DDR4? PCIe 3.0 x 5 Lanes? M.2 x 2? At least that board gives you a game right?
Well there goes the joke.
MB Manual: ftp://asrock.cn/manual/X99%20Extreme11.pdf
It will be great next year when M.2 Interfaces are more common and even better capable.
ASUS’s M.2 Interface seems to only support ONE short Card but the X99 Extreme11 accepts 2 Cards from 3 to 11 cm long. I see a new RACE to support longer Cards in greater quantities.
It would be neat to see each of the X99 Extreme11’s M.2 Ports double stacked, so we could get 4 Cards on the MB. Hang a couple next to each rack of DIMMs for a total of 6 Ports.
ASUS claims they have a RAMDisk that is 20x times faster than SSD, (like on their Maximus VII Formula MB), now we need to work on getting 10G Ethernet on these MBs (it goes without saying we want 10G Ethernet in our homes, at a low cost – Hint: Local Cable Provider). Then the last battle remaining is efficient 4-Way scaling.
More than some people need, here we come !
I’d really like to see Les, do a test on the Asus Maximus Hero VI with the Intel DC P3700
So would I! We haven’t had much luck with ASUS board supply unfortunately… maybe in the future!
Asus or anyone please send Les the new Asus x99 Rampage V Extreme Motherboard so he can perform a review on it
does this motherboard support install windows on a M.2 RAID 0 configuration?
thanks!
Thank you for the review.
I need a sustained sequential write of 3.2GB/s on a raid 0 with 8 Samsung SSD 850 Pro 1TB.
Do you think this board can help me?
thanks !