The EVGA X299 Micro Motherboard Review: A Smaller Take on X299

CPU Performance, Short Form

For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC timings for these tests, respective to the maximum supported DRAM frequency of the processor. This makes it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.

Rendering - Blender 2.78: link

For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.

Our Blender testing has the EVGA FTW Micro landing in the middle of the pack completing the benchmark in 204 seconds. 

Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high-end platforms.

Our POV-Ray results have the Micro second to last, in front of its big brother in the FTW K. The difference here we found during our sanity checks was to see the CPU running at its base clock of 3.3 GHz throughout this testing. Typically, depending on the board, the 7900X CPU should run from 3.6-3.7 GHz, and the Micro is throttling back to the base clocks. According to Intel's XTU utility, this is due to current limit throttling. This curious phenomenon, which happens at stock speeds, goes away when overclocked, as indicated by the higher result.

Compression – WinRAR 5.4: link

Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30-second 720p videos.

WinRAR results have the Micro as the second slowest of the bunch posting a time of 37.9 seconds, again behind the FTW K.   

Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link

As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.

For our 7-Zip results the Micro scores 58995 which is middle of the pack, and less than 1% away from the second spot. No anomalies here.  

Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link

3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz, and IPC win in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.

The 3DPM results were also positive coming in 4th place and in the middle of the pack. 

Neuron Simulation - DigiCortex v1.20: link

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. Results are taken during the steady state period in a 32k neuron simulation and represented as a function of the ability to simulate in real time (1.000x equals real-time).

In the DigiCortex testing, the FTW K managed 1.15 score which is more towards the middle of our results. There are seven boards within 0.02x fractions of real-time simulation of each other in this grouping.