1. Introduction2. ASRock X99 WS-E/10G: Packaging and Bundle3. ASRock X99 WS-E/10G: Board Layout and Features4. ASRock X99 WS-E/10G: UEFI BIOS5. 10Gbit Ethernet6. Testing Methodology and Configuration7. Tests: Maxon Cinebench R158. Tests: Base Disk Performance9. Tests: Network File Copy10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

Motherboards aimed at professional usage have quite different requirements to those aimed at consumer activities like gaming. For a start, whilst gamers are swiftly moving onto the Z170 chipset and Intel Skylake procesors, because quad-core is usually enough, workstations have generally stuck with X99 and Haswell E processors, due to the latter offering support for Core i7 CPUs up to eight-core, and Xeons up to 18-core. But there are other features that the professional might need that they consider worth paying extra for, and the ASRock X99 WS-E/10G showcases one of them – 10Gbit Ethernet networking.

We say ‘worth paying for' because this motherboard comes at a price that will make you wince – over £600. But for that, apart from the super-fast network ports (there are two of them), there is a host of additional features, including seven PCI Express 16x slots, an eSATA port, and support for up to 128GB of DDR4 memory.

The latter can be ECC memory with a Xeon processor, and registered memory. But the networking is the star of the show, and very few motherboards offer this built in, so our review will focus primarily on this aspect.

Features:

• Intel Core i7 and Xeon E5-1600/2600 v3 processors for LGA2011-3 socket up to 18 cores and 160W.
• Quad-channel memory up to DDR4 3200+(OC).
• Up to 128GB memory.
• Support for ECC (Xeon only) and registered memory as well as unregistered.
• 7 PCI Express x16 slots (4 run at x16, 3 run at x8).
• 4-way SLI and CrossFireX (x16) supported with PLX8747 bridge.
• 7.1-channel Realtek ALC1150 HD audio.
• 2 x 10Gbit LAN via Intel X540 chipset.
• 2 x Gigabit Ethernet via Intel I210AT chipset.
• 12 x SATA 3, 1 x eSATA, 1 x SATA Express, 1 x M.2 (PCI Express Gen2 x4 and SATA3, 1 x SATA DOM.
• 8 x USB 3.0 (4 rear, 4 via header), 8 x USB 2.0 (4 rear, 4 via header), 1 x USB DOM.
• Supports Microsoft Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, Server 2012 R2 64-bit, Server 2012 64-bit, Server 2008 R2 64-bit.

Price for this motherboard (at the time of writing): £620 (inc. VAT)                                     

At over £600, this motherboard really should come with the kitchen sink, but the bundle is fairly standard, with a few exceptions.

The motherboard itself is reassuringly protected in a foam tray. This should keep it reasonably safe in transit.

In the box, alongside the expected rear cut-out port shield, there are six SATA 6Gb/sec cables, but the most welcome inclusion is the trio of SLI bridges. There's a flexible two-way ribbon cable, plus non-flexible three-way and four-way options.

There's also a solitary screw for securing a M.2 storage card.

Separate manuals for the motherboard hardware and software are included, alongside the driver CD.

The PCB is not as ‘bling' as gaming motherboards have become these days, but it's not sober and boring, either, with blue heat sinks lifting the appearance, although professional users probably won't care much about this.

The LGA2011-3 CPU socket is surrounded by four DDR4 DIMM slots on each side, for a total of eight. Populating these with 16GB modules would give you the maximum of 128GB (and require a second mortgage on your house).

The socket itself supports Haswell E processors, so you can use Core i7 5820K, 5930K and 5960X, plus all the Xeon E5-1600 and 2600 v3 CPUs, including the insane 18-core 2699 v3, which was allegedly produced originally as a special request for Google's server farms.

Adjacent is a standard four-pin power connector for adding extra input when lots of graphics cards are installed, and an internal USB port for a Disk on Module (DOM). A Clear CMOS jumper is found here too.

The seven PCI Express x16 slots dominate the lower half of the motherboard, and there are no other types of PCI Express or PCI slots included. There’s another four-pin power connector for the PCI Express at the bottom. Populating all of the PCI Express slots with power-hungry cards won’t be very sensible from an airflow and temperature point of view, but there should be sufficient power to drive them all.

ASRock has alternated these slots between 16 and 8 lanes, with four of the former and three of the latter. The SLI bridges are designed to fit with the spacing of the 16-lane slots.

A princely total of 12 SATA ports are available on one edge of the board, with two on one end adjacent to the host port that allows them to become SATA Express. But there's only one of these. Ten of the SATA ports come from the Intel chispet, and two from the Marvell one. Nearby is the M.2 header, with the usual screw pillar (and included screw) to secure it. In the bottom corner is a SATA DOM connector. So your storage options are myriad.

The built-in buttons for power and reset are high quality, and definitely handy when you’re testing a build (or reviewing a motherboard!). There’s a switch for choosing between two BIOSes, which is a great safety feature. If one BIOS gets corrupted, you can simply switch to the other, backup BIOS and copy that back to the primary chip.

So you should never have your motherboard killed by a corrupted BIOS. Another hugely useful feature when setting things up is the Dr Debug two-digit LED readout, which provides descriptive error codes that can be used to figure out exactly what is causing the system not to start.

Nearby are headers for four more USB 3 ports, plus headers for four more USB 2 ports.

The backplane sports two regular Intel Gigabit Ethernet ports, one with a pair of USB 2 ports underneath, and one with a pair of USB 3 ports. Two more USB 3 ports sit above an external clear CMOS switch, whilst two more USB 2 accompany the eSATA port.

Next are the most exciting inclusions – the two 10Gbit Ethernet ports. Using Intel's Teaming software, all four network ports can be grouped together in parallel for huge bandwidth – assuming your networking infrastructure can support this. Finally, there's the usual six audio ports, including five minijacks and optical S/PDIF. One thing missing here is USB 3.1 of any form, but you’re more than catered for when it comes to networking.

The UEFI BIOS had no problems working with either of the generic USB mice or keyboards we used. However, it doesn’t have the most exciting of designs or layouts. It’s more functional, although not every function is obvious in its location.

The main screen simply tells you about the processor and memory you have installed.

The OC Tweaker page provides some simple overclocking options, including the 4GHz and XMP OC Setting that sets optimised settings for you. There’s an optimised CPU option, too, which provides preset overclocks in increments of 200MHz from 4GHz to 4.6GHz, although the latter is clearly not recommended as it has been shaded in red.

When the processor is in non-overclocked mode, there is a multi-core enhancement option that sets all cores on maximum turbo multiplier. However, we found you could set both the 4GHz and Optimised CPU OC settings simultaneously, which would result in a clock speed in excess of 5GHz, and an unstable PC that wouldn't boot. There really should be a system in place where selecting one deselects the other.

Alternatively, there’s a very comprehensive array of manual settings, with the option of saving up to five profiles, although this is not the target market for this board.

The Advanced screen is where you find the majority of everyday settings, including for the CPU, chipset, storage, Super IO, ACPI and USB.

The extra CPU settings in the Advanced section include turning Hyper-Threading off or on, selecting the number of cores to enable, and toggling virtualisation technology.

The chipset configuration provides PCI Express configuration options, and the ability to enable the LAN connections as well as the audio chipset.

The Storage section lets you configure the Intel and Marvell SATA chipsets, and also how each detected storage device is treated.

Super IO configures the serial port header, ACPI controls how the system responds to sleep modes, USB lets you switch between various USB modes, and the Trusted Computing section sets up how the TPM chip behaves.

There are lots of sundry extras to be found in the Tools section, including facilities to flash the BIOS and back up from one BIOS chip to the other – great if you've set one BIOS to parameters that won't even post.

The usual array of hardware health readings can be found in the H/W Monitor section.

Configure passwords and secure boot options under Security.

Finally, lots of startup options can be found under Boot, including the extremely handy booting from USB, which can make OS installation exceedingly rapid.

Ethernet is constantly improving in performance. The pinnacle in 1985 was 10Mbits/sec, which rose to 100Mbits/sec in 1995, and then 1Gbit/sec in 1998. The 10Gbits/sec standard arrived four years later in 2002. However, this was a fiber-optic connection only. Support for twin-axial cabling (like your TV aerial) was introduced in 2004, and then finally 10Gbit networking over the standard twisted pair cabling we associate with regular office and home Ethernet became available in 2006.

So the type of 10Gbit Ethernet provided by the Asrock X99 WS-E/10G has been around for nine years. However, to get the full performance you can't just use your existing Ethernet cabling infrastructure. This is likely to be “Cat 5”, which is only rated up to 1Gbit Ethernet.

Instead, at least Cat 6 will be required, which is more expensive, and would require a complete rewire of your premises. This is why switching to 10Gbit is not a simple plug-and-play upgrade, and hasn't been widespread over the last nine years.

With Cat 6 cabling, the maximum cable length is 55m before a switch or repeater will be required to boost the signal. But putting that 10Gbits/sec performance in perspective, the bandwidth is 1,280 MB/sec, so more than twice as fast as the best SATA3-connected SSDs, and not far off the read performance of the latest speed merchant M.2 PCI Express SSDs either.

In other words, you can potentially access storage over the network at speeds similar to if it was attached locally – which is what we intend to test in this article.

We were supplied with two ASRock X99 WS-E/10G samples, so we could test the 10Gbit Ethernet line speed. Both boards sported Intel Core i7-5930K CPUs. This is a six-core processor running at a nominal 3.5GHz, with a 3.7GHz Turbo Mode and Hyper-Threading – so it presents as 12 threads.

It has 15MB of L3 cache and a 140W TDP. It’s second only to the eight-core 5960X as Haswell E Core i7s go, so has plenty of potential to show this motherboard in its best light. It has the same PCI Express lane configurations as the 5960X too, with two x16 and one x8.

The Intel Core i7 processors in each motherboard were kept at bay with gigantic Noctua NH-D15S coolers.

We equipped one of the motherboards with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance 2,133MHz DDR4 SDRAM, and the other with 64GB. Both systems were configured for quad-channel memory. Since we weren’t aiming to test graphics extensively, focusing instead on the networking, lower-end NVIDIA Quadros were used – a K1200 and a K620. Finally, we used PNY Client CL4111 SSDs for the operating system – one 240GB unit, and one 480GB unit. These are MLC NAND SSDs using Seagate SandForce SF2281 controllers, and offer reading and writing in excess of 500MB/sec.

We ran three tests. First, we ran Maxon Cinebench R15’s rendering test, to assess the base performance and standard overclocking capability of the board. Then we set up 10GB RAM disks using ImDisk on both the systems. Although our test SSDs are fast, they’re not as fast as 10Gbit Ethernet, and even the latest PCI Express models could be a bottleneck. Operating at DDR4 quad-channel speed, a RAM disk won’t have this issue, so the network connection will be tested to its fullest.

To show throughput, we copied 9.57GB of files from the RAM disk on one system (Host) to the RAM disk on the other (Client) across the network, using a Cat 6 crossover cable rather than a switch, so no switching layer overhead would be introduced. We ran this file copy in both directions (ie copying to the Client system and from the Client system). As controls, we copied to the host SSD to the RAM disk on the remote machine across the network, and vice versa. We also performed the same RAM disk file copy across the motherboard’s standard Gigabit Ethernet ports, to show how much faster 10Gbit Ethernet is compared to the standard connection type.

Finally, we ran Crystal DiskMark 5.0.2 on the SSDs and RAM disks, to show the base performance of each storage type.

Motherboard test specification:

• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• CPU: Core i7 5930K
• Cooler: Noctua NH-D15S
• Memory: 16GB (4 x 4GB) or 64GB (8 x 8GB) 2,133MHz Corsair Vengeance DDR4 SDRAM
• Graphics: 4GB GDDR5 NVIDIA Quadro K1200 or 2GB DDR3 NVIDIA Quadro K620
• Storage: 240GB or 480GB PNY Client CL4111 SSD

Tests:
Maxon Cinebench R15 – all-core CPU benchmark
Crystal DiskMark 5.0.2 – storage transfer rates
9.57GB File Copy – transfer rates across network

Maxon Cinebench R15

Although this isn’t really an enthusiast motherboard, being X99 and having a Core i7 processor installed, it still supports overclocking, which professional workstation manufacturers will often call “frequency enhanced”. We set the ASRock to its standard overclocked processor and RAM XMP level with the Core i7 and memory installed, which was 4.07GHz for the 5930K. We then tried the 4.4GHz Optimised preset. The results are shown here.

There are clear benefits from the two overclocking modes, both of which are easy to select and proved entirely stable during testing. With a 20 per cent multi-threaded performance boost available from the 4.4GHz setting, if you have good enough cooling then it's a no brainer to use this option. Indeed, many workstation manufacturers offer this kind of clock speed guaranteed for three years with Haswell E Core i7 processors, so it's clearly not going to cause major problems.

SSD Performance

The PNY SSDs live up to their billing for read performance, and exhibit the reduced write performance we usually see with CrystalDiskMark, due to the way it performs its write testing.

RAM Disk Performance

With sequential reads in excess of 5,000MB/sec and writes in excess of 9,000MB/sec, the RAM disk was not going to be a bottleneck during our networking tests, as this is at least four times the nominal line speed of 10Gbit Ethernet.

Network File Copy

(Note that figures above are showing in MB/sec)

Copying files from the RAM disk on the host system to the one on the client system was over nine times faster over 10Gbit Ethernet than regular Gigabit Ethernet. The 1,015.16MB/sec average throughput is also 79 per cent of the nominal speed of the connection, showing the potential available from 10Gbit Ethernet.

Putting this in perspective, a 8.5GB video DVD would take less than nine seconds to copy across. Looking at the two SSD to RAM disk copies across 10Gbit Ethernet shows the remote drives are almost behaving as if they are attached locally.

(Note that figures above are showing in MB/sec)

Although copying the files off the remote system to the local one isn't as quick as the other way round, it's still nearly seven times faster than over regular Gigabit Ethernet. Copying from remote RAM disk to local SSD was obviously experiencing some kind of extra overhead compared to the other way round. But the message is clear – 10Gbit Ethernet is an amazingly fast networking connection.

The ASRock X99 WS-E/10G is an expensive motherboard – one of the most pricey you can currently purchase. It’s at least 50 per cent more costly than most X99 chipset motherboards, and two or three times the price of many. However, it’s worth considering that a 10Gbit Ethernet network interface card will set you back at least £200, and this motherboard has two of them built in. So if you will be using the 10Gbit networking the price perhaps isn’t so extortionate.

However, if you’re merely an enthusiast, even the draw of quad SLI and CrossFire X capabilities won’t make this price worth paying. This is clearly a motherboard that is packed with features for high-end professional usage, and has lots of potential for workstations.

However, the star of the show is the 10Gbit Ethernet, and while this entirely lived up to our performance expectations, you will need a 10Gbit Ethernet networking infrastructure to take advantage of it. And if you don’t already have this or plan to invest soon, there are many excellent and much cheaper alternatives without the super-fast networking, including a non-10Gbit Ethernet version of this board called the ASRock X99 WS-E.

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Pros:

• Amazing 10Gbit Ethernet networking performance
• Four networking ports – two 10Gbit, two Gigabit.
• Supports quad SLI and CrossFire X.
• Simple frequency enhancement presets.
• Ample SATA and Disk on Module provisions.
• Onboard power buttons and debug LEDs.
• Dual BIOS with backup copy function.
• Comprehensive UEFI BIOS configuration options.

Cons:

• Very expensive.
• No USB 3.1.
• Just one SATA Express port.

KitGuru says: The ASRock X99 WS-E/10G shows what 10Gbit Ethernet is capable of. It’s a premium quality, feature-rich motherboard, although it also costs a fortune.

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