ASRock X99 WS Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 29.08.14Page:
Conclusion
| Allgemein | + | - | |
| With the X99 WS ASRock has a solid motherboard in it's portfolio, which is based on Intels latest X99 chipset. Having a closer look at the features mix reveals there have quite a few reasonable choices been made. Which is why here and there you see that ASRock has actually been holding back installing another and yet another additional chip. Nevertheless we would have liked to find a few more USB 3.0 ports at the back panel for example. On another note there are no SATA Express ports on this board. These days there are virtually no SATA Express devices available, which can be seen as a justification for not equipping the board with such ports. | -
Design - Layout |
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| Layout | + | - | |
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The ASRock X99 WS's layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons. There is also a debug display which is very useful in case you should have issues with a component in your system or the board itself. Apart from that the placement of the PCI-Express x16 slots is very well chosen. There is a total of five full sized PCI Express slots and between the first two PCI Express x16 slots there is a M.2 x4 slot. Should you want to do that, you can go ahead and build a quad-GPU system using this board as a basis. |
- Angled SATA connectors
- 5 x Full-Size PCI Express x16 - Power/Reset-Button onboard - Debug display - Space around the CPU socket - M.2 x4 |
- No SATA Express | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Let's have closer look at overall 3D performance. Calcualting the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board comes in third. Concerning the average of all 2D benchmarks we ran, this board again reaches third position. At this point we're quite sure, ASRock is capable of getting some more performance out of this motherboard and we're looking forward to finding BIOS updates on ASRocks files servers. On another note we had a look at power consumption and it turns out that this board is quite a bit more power efficient than the competition. | - Power consumption | - 3DMark Fire Strike Physics | |
| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| The BIOS of the X99 WS is identical from what you get with other recent ASRock motherboards these days. This means the basic structure and also the design has not been changed apart from the color scheme. Overall the structure is easy to understand and even if you're not a very experienced user you will find the things you'd like to change. On another note it's always interesting to see how mature a BIOS is before a prodcut launch. ASRock did a pretty good job with this on but still, every here and there the performance could be improved. | - Clear arrangement - Sheer amount of options | ||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The ASRock X99 WS is most certainly going to be one of the more affordable X99 motherboards. So far we only find this model listed at Caseking for a price of 295 Euro. We're quite sure the prices will drop by quite a margin during the first weeks after launch and in that case this will be a very reasonable choice. Should you be looking for a new X99 motherboard for your workstation, considering the X99 WS from ASRock is definitely no mistake. | -
Workstation - Enthusiast |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASRock X99 WS very good 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
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