Building an ASRock X299 Fatal1ty Test Bench with the i9-7900x

So you just built a brand new Z270 PC and Intel comes out with the newest X299 ahead of schedule.  Is it worth the bump to have the latest and greatest… or do you stick with the Z?  If you are a media professional or high end user that needs every core you can get, the Intel Skylake-X i9-7900x is a monster with its 10 core/20 thread configuration, quad-channel memory and 44 PCIe 3.0 lanes. Our build today consists of the newest ASRock X299 Fatal1ty Professional Gaming motherboard, Intel’ newest Core i9-7900x CPU and 32GB of Corsair’ Vengeance RGB DDR4-3600 Quad-Channel memory.  We will draw comparison to our previous Z270 build in our tests, the results of which evern surprised us.

 The price point for the Intel i9-7900x CPU hits that $1k mark which may leave many Kaby Lake users standing firm on where they are right now, especially with things being shaken up by AMD as of late.  Add to this Intel Optane Memory and IRST PCIe support on the X299, Intel Turbo Boost Max technology 3.0, and the ability to RAID 3 M.2 SSDs together on a single mobo (wait fot it) and you have the most powerful solution available to the consumer today.  The mess begins…

Our X299 Test Bench was made possible by ASRock, and Corsair, to which we owe a big thank you for their sponsorship. LEDs have become front and center in the PC world as of late and, with just a little pushing, our system is currently running at 4.4GHz with DDR4-3600 Quad Channel memory at 3460Mhz…..and we will get to that also. 

In our build today, we see LEDs in the motherboard, case fans, CPU fans, graphics card and and even the memory itself.  Most are adjustable for fan speed, color pattern and modes.

This is how the office looks very early in the morning when things are finally complete.  We chose to return to the arctic white Corsair Graphite Series 760T chassis as it is just that much easier building with a full tower chassis.  Coincidentally, it became a great choice as it matched the power supply and its cabling perfectly.
AIDA CPUID displays our systems specs rather well, confirming the CPU, motherboard and memory.