The EVGA X299 Micro Motherboard Review: A Smaller Take on X299
by Joe Shields on February 9, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- U.2
- X299
- Skylake-X
- Kaby Lake-X
Gaming Performance
Ashes of the Singularity is a Real Time Strategy game developed by Oxide Games and Stardock Entertainment. The original AoTS was released back in March of 2016 while the standalone expansion pack, Escalation, was released in November of 2016 adding more structures, maps, and units. We use this specific benchmark as it relies on both a good GPU as well as on the CPU in order to get the most frames per second. This balance is able to better display any system differences in gaming as opposed to a more GPU heavy title where the CPU and system don't matter quite as much. We use the default "Crazy" in-game settings using the DX11 rendering path in both 1080p and 4K UHD resolutions. The benchmark is run four times and the results averaged then plugged into the graph.
Our AOTSe testing continues to be a tight-knit dataset with almost 2 frames per second separating things in the more CPU heavy 1080p and less than 1 frame per second in 4K. The Micro's performance was right on par with the rest of the data sets able to pull 43.1 frames per second in 1080p and 35.3 in 4K UHD.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game that features similar gameplay found in 2013's Tomb Raider. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.
One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 3 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
The ROTR results are also showing very close results with the few datasets we have. In this case, the Micro reached 93.2 FPS in 1080p while the 4K UHD testing yielded 40 FPS.
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casteve - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
"This showcases one of the downsides of a HEDT system: while other platforms (like Z170) were getting under 100 regularly, the additional featureset of these large platforms results in a higher DPC Latency."I don't think it's the feature set. It just showcases that Intel failed to optimize for DPC latency with this chipset. eg: z77 good dpc latency, z87 bad, z97 and 170 good... sometimes Intel is on the ball, sometimes it isn't.
jabber - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
Excellent, a X299 board for the over 25's!wolfemane - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
Hey some of us over 25's are kids at heart... and have kids. I love RGB. I'd happily add RGB to a system with this board.DanNeely - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
OTOH even at 18 I'd've probably been like "Really?!?!?" Other than being brushed aluminum when that was still far from common the case I used for the system built right after my 20th was mundane as they come.Samus - Saturday, February 10, 2018 - link
Ditto. Even when I was a teenager I preferred the look of my corporate-class Prolinea or industrial design of a boxy Lian-Li to something with a window and lights. The most adventurous thing I've done is put a LED in my water pump so I can tell when the coolant is flowing.peevee - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
Isn't having only 2 memory slots defeats the purpose of X299-compatible CPUs?DanNeely - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
It has 4, 2 on each side. It's still quad channel so you get the double bandwidth vs the mainstream dual channel CPUs. You're still down 50% on capacity; but between the larger socket size of LGA20xx (AMD Epyc with a ~3500 pin socket is even worse, to the extent that something like half the board for it are the even larger E-ATX form factor that's rarely been used outside of 2 socket boards in the past) and all the extra stuff the bigger CPUs can support there's not enough space on the PCB to do everything that the CPU itself could do on anything smaller than a full ATX. Micro ATX with these CPUs requires picking and choosing what features you need instead of just taking everything.Samus - Saturday, February 10, 2018 - link
Basically, if you need more than 32GB of memory, you are better off spending more on a bigger board because the cost of high-density DDR4 will effectively kill any cost savings. ie, 4x8GB DIMMs are substantially cheaper than 2x16GB DIMMs.cosmotic - Friday, February 9, 2018 - link
On the first page: "This specific review will cover the ASRock X299E-ITX/ac." (probably pasted from said review to this one, which is for an EVGA board)Joe Shields - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
Updated.