CPU & GPU Performance
Cinebench
More cores are key when it comes to tasks like Cinebench, and while I had my reservations about the i9 CPU series, it’s clear that it’s no slouch. The X299 boards are king here, by quite a margin, although it’s the AORUS board that takes the crown at both stock and overclocked values.
WPrime
Again we see the X299 motherboards leading the charge for WPrime, clocking in our fastest times to date, with the AORUS board being quite a LOT faster than the ASUS motherboard; very impressive!
Interestingly, the overclocking performance was much closer, which tells me the Gigabyte board was able to maintain a higher clock speed automatically at stock settings. That’s no surprise though, this is a much more expensive motherboard.
SiSoft Sandra
Again, rock solid results here, and it’s already clear that the i9 and X299 have enough legs for general heavy workloads. It’s also nice to see that the extra investment on the flagship Gaming 9 brings tangible gains too.
3DMark
The Gaming 9 is quite a bit in the lead here, pulling way ahead of the X299-E Gaming which is in the lower half of the chart!
Once again, overclocking has brought the performance of the X299-E much closer, but the Gaming 9 is not even close to losing the top spot.
Gaming
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
As you can see, all of the boards tested aren’t throttling the CPU/GPU in any significant way here. The X299 boards are not at the top, but that’s not really what we’re testing here. The throughput is obviously comparable and the GPU is able to do its job just fine.
Overclocking did bring a small gain, about 1fps ahead of the other boards.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Another strong result, with frame rates that are right on target.
Thing looking good while overclocking, although the X370 has squeezed in between the Gaming 9 and X299-E this time.
leak not even intel can do this
“Optane ready” is not a pro – it’s actually Intel’s way of pushing out the competition in NVME and SSD storage. After you spend the big bucks on these motherboards, you’ll have to shell out even more to buy a “VROC upgrade key” to enable RAID features. Want a bootable RAID0 array to take advantage of the X299 chipset’s RAID, optimized for this sort of storage? Not without Optane drives or the VROC key you won’t. It’s a completely artificial limitation.
Also, don’t bother even TRYING to buy a VROC key. None for sale as of yet… Intel forced Gigabyte and others to rush out these X299 motherboards two months ahead of schedule.