The MSI X299 Tomahawk Arctic Motherboard Review: White as Snow
by Joe Shields on November 20, 2017 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- MSI
- M.2
- USB 3.1
- X299
- Skylake-X
- Tomahawk
- Tomahawk Arctic
Benchmark Overview
For our testing, depending on the product, we attempt to tailor the presentation of our global benchmark suite down into what users who would buy this hardware might actually want to run. For CPUs, our full test suite is typically used to gather data and all the results are placed into Bench, our benchmark database for users that want to look at non-typical benchmarks or legacy data. For motherboards, we run our short form CPU tests, the gaming tests with half the GPUs of our processor suite, and our system benchmark tests which focus on non-typical and non-obvious performance metrics that are the focal point for specific groups of users.
The benchmarks fall into several areas:
Short Form CPU
Our short form testing script uses a straight run through of a mixture of known apps or workloads and requires about four hours. These are typically the CPU tests we run in our motherboard suite, to identify any performance anomalies.
| CPU Short Form Benchmarks | |
| Three Dimensional Particle Movement v2.1 (3DPM) | 3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, derived from my academic research years looking at particle movement parallelism. The coding for this tool was rough, but emulates the real world in being non-CompSci trained code for a scientific endeavor. The code is unoptimized, but the test uses OpenMP to move particles around a field using one of six 3D movement algorithms in turn, each of which is found in the academic literature. |
| The second version of this benchmark is similar to the first, however it has been re-written in VS2012 with one major difference: the code has been written to address the issue of false sharing. If data required by multiple threads, say four, is in the same cache line, the software cannot read the cache line once and split the data to each thread - instead it will read four times in a serial fashion. The new software splits the data to new cache lines so reads can be parallelized and stalls minimized. | |
| WinRAR 5.4 | WinRAR is a compression based software to reduce file size at the expense of CPU cycles. We use the version that has been a stable part of our benchmark database through 2015, and run the default settings on a 1.52GB directory containing over 2800 files representing a small website with around thirty half-minute videos. We take the average of several runs in this instance. |
| POV-Ray 3.7.1 b4 | POV-Ray is a common ray-tracing tool used to generate realistic looking scenes. We've used POV-Ray in its various guises over the years as a good benchmark for performance, as well as a tool on the march to ray-tracing limited immersive environments. We use the built-in multi threaded benchmark. |
| HandBrake v1.0.2 | HandBrake is a freeware video conversion tool. We use the tool in to process two different videos into x264 in an MP4 container - first a 'low quality' two-hour video at 640x388 resolution to x264, then a 'high quality' ten-minute video at 4320x3840, and finally the second video again but into HEVC. The low-quality video scales at lower performance hardware, whereas the buffers required for high-quality tests can stretch even the biggest processors. At current, this is a CPU only test. |
| 7-Zip 9.2 | 7-Zip is a freeware compression/decompression tool that is widely deployed across the world. We run the included benchmark tool using a 50MB library and take the average of a set of fixed-time results. |
| DigiCortex v1.20 | The newest benchmark in our suite is DigiCortex, a simulation of biologically plausible neural network circuits, and simulates activity of neurons and synapses. DigiCortex relies heavily on a mix of DRAM speed and computational throughput, indicating that systems which apply memory profiles properly should benefit and those that play fast and loose with overclocking settings might get some extra speed up. |
System Benchmarks
Our system benchmarks are designed to probe motherboard controller performance, particularly any additional USB controllers or the audio controller. As general platform tests we have DPC Latency measurements and system boot time, which can be difficult to optimize for on the board design and manufacturing level.
| System Benchmarks | |
| Power Consumption | One of the primary differences between different motherboads is power consumption. Aside from the base defaults that every motherboard needs, things like power delivery, controller choice, routing and firmware can all contribute to how much power a system can draw. This increases for features such as PLX chips and multi-gigabit ethernet. |
| Non-UEFI POST Time | The POST sequence of the motherboard becomes before loading the OS, and involves pre-testing of onboard controllers, the CPU, the DRAM and everything else to ensure base stability. The number of controllers, as well as firmware optimizations, affect the POST time a lot. We test the BIOS defaults as well as attempt a stripped POST. |
| Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.2.5 | Testing onboard audio is difficult, especially with the numerous amount of post-processing packages now being bundled with hardware. Nonetheless, manufacturers put time and effort into offering a 'cleaner' sound that is loud and of a high quality. RMAA, with version 6.2.5 (newer versions have issues), under the right settings can be used to test the signal-to-noise ratio, signal crossover, and harmonic distortion with noise. |
| USB Backup | USB ports can come from a variety of sources: chipsets, controllers or hubs. More often than not, the design of the traces can lead to direct impacts on USB performance as well as firmware level choices relating to signal integrity on the motherboard. |
| DPC Latency | Another element is deferred procedure call latency, or the ability to handle interrupt servicing. Depending on the motherboard firmware and controller selection, some motherboards handle these interrupts quicker than others. A poor result could lead to delays in performance, or for example with audio, a delayed request can manifest in distinct audible pauses, pops or clicks. |
Gaming
Our gaming benchmarks are designed to show any differences in performance when playing games.
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21 Comments
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Lolimaster - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
Why buy this when Threaripper X399 is better in every possible way, like more pci-e lane, upgrades for the next 3 years. Modular arch.Lolimaster - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
You can use ECC out of the box, nvme bootable raid, etc.mkaibear - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1904?vs=19...That's why (note not identical parts because it's a 12 core TR vs an 8 core i7 - but they are as close as I can get in terms of costs). If I went the other way and went with a 10 core i9 vs the 16 core TR then we see roughly the same pattern of behaviour.
Threadripper wins in the multithreaded tests so long as the workload suits it but for the many benchmarks it's per-core speed which is more important than number of cores.
In essence, if your work requires fast cores and quite a few threads then you're better off with the i7 or i9, if it utilizes loads of threads but speed is less important then you're better off with the TR.
So; given that there are obvious use cases for both processors I'm afraid I can't agree that "Threadripper X399 is better in every possible way".
BroderLund - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
For instance if you look at video encoding. Puget Systems are incredible detailed in their testing. Check out their Skylake-X vs Threadripper articles for both Premiere Pro CC and Davinci Resolve here:https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/DaVinci...
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premier...
You can see that thredripper is not "better in every possible way". It really depends what is the most important in the system. RAW cpu power, expandability, multi gpu, multi nvme including multi gpu, raid cards, network cards and so on.
DanNeely - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
TR can also win if you need the extra PCIe lanes; but with SLI/xFire both slowly dying in the 2 card version and more rapidly in the 3/4 card formats the need for a huge number of lanes is going away for gaming.rsandru - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
My two 1080Tis are doing just fine, no need to worry :-)eek2121 - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
Hopefully the BIOS/UEFI on this board isn't as buggy as the X399 board I have. Broken fan profiles, settings corruption over time, etc. all plague my X399 board. This was my first MSI board and it's going to be my last!Joe Shields - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
The fan I had attached during testing (a DC fan) worked fine throughout the testing period. No settings corrupted over time but, it was only a week or so it was on the test bench.eek2121 - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
Did you try setting a custom profile in the bios? For my X399 I tried changing the fans to go from 0% to 100% in a range from 40C-66C, the end result is that the fans don't end up turning on at all.Joe Shields - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
No custom profiles, no. The default set worked.