The ASUS ROG Maximus X Apex Review: X Marks the Spot, Literally

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 for the supported frequency of the processor for these tests, making 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.

The Blender results for the Apex have the board leading the tightly grouped pack taking 300 seconds to complete the benchmark. The rest of the results are around a percent or so behind.

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 1-2 minutes on high-end platforms.

Our frequency and core friendly benchmark POV-Ray also have the Apex leading another group of similar results. The difference between most of these are less than 1% so for all intents and purposes, performance was the same here.

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 testing shows the Apex mixing in the with the pack at 41.4 seconds. All results were within one second of each other noting these ran at similar speeds during testing and there is negligible difference between our datasets so far. 

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.

The 7-Zip results show the Apex again leading a closely packed set of results . All results, minus the SuperO board, very close to each other with a benchmark variance being the difference between them. 

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.

In 3DPM21, The Apex reached 1876 Mop/s, again leasing the pack. The scores of all Z370 and i7-8700K testing were within 60 points (around 3%) of each other. The CPUs all ran the same speeds in this test, so again we see a margin of error size differences between our datasets so far. 

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).

The DigiCortex results have the i7-8700K coming in at 1.02, again looking ever so slightly down at the rest of the results. DigiCortex does show a decent spread between results which is different than we have seen previously as the test is very DRAM sensitive. Any additional optimizations that the motherboard manufacturer makes either in firmware or trace layout can make a difference.