It's An RGB Disco: The GIGABYTE X299 Gaming 7 Pro Motherboard, Reviewed
by Joe Shields on January 26, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gaming
- Intel
- Gigabyte
- AORUS
- RGB
- X299
- Basin Falls
- Skylake-X
- Gaming 7 Pro
System Performance
Not all motherboards are created equal. On the face of it, they should all perform the same and differ only in the functionality they provide - however, this is not the case. The obvious pointers are power consumption, but also the ability for the manufacturer to optimize USB speed, audio quality (based on audio codec), POST time and latency. This can come down to manufacturing process and prowess, so these are tested.
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system while in a single GPU configuration with a wall meter connected to the Corsair HX 750 power supply. This power supply is Platinum rated. As I am in the US on a 120 V supply, leads to ~87% efficiency > 75W, and 92%+ efficiency at 375W, suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers. These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.
In our long idle testing, the AORUS X299 Gaming 7 ended up with a middle of the pack result overall. This results shows the board is in line with most others in the way it handles clockspeeds within this test.
Non-UEFI POST Time
Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we look at the POST Boot Time using a stopwatch. This is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows 10 starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.
Post times for the AORUS X299 Gaming 7 Pro lead the pack with a time of 24.4 seconds. This is a small margin of victory over the EVGA FTW-K and the ASRock Mini-ITX board.
Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.2.5
Rightmark:AA indicates how well the sound system is built and isolated from electrical interference (either internally or externally). For this test we connect the Line Out to the Line In using a short six inch 3.5mm to 3.5mm high-quality jack, turn the OS speaker volume to 100%, and run the Rightmark default test suite at 192 kHz, 24-bit. The OS is tuned to 192 kHz/24-bit input and output, and the Line-In volume is adjusted until we have the best RMAA value in the mini-pretest. We look specifically at the Dynamic Range of the audio codec used on board, as well as the Total Harmonic Distortion + Noise.
Due to circumstances currently out of our control, we were unable to get RMAA results for this board. The problem does not lie with the board itself. Once we are able to get it working properly, the space will be updated with data.
DPC Latency
Deferred Procedure Call latency is a way in which Windows handles interrupt servicing. In order to wait for a processor to acknowledge the request, the system will queue all interrupt requests by priority. Critical interrupts will be handled as soon as possible, whereas lesser priority requests such as audio will be further down the line. If the audio device requires data, it will have to wait until the request is processed before the buffer is filled.
If the device drivers of higher priority components in a system are poorly implemented, this can cause delays in request scheduling and process time. This can lead to an empty audio buffer and characteristic audible pauses, pops and clicks. The DPC latency checker measures how much time is taken processing DPCs from driver invocation. The lower the value will result in better audio transfer at smaller buffer sizes. Results are measured in microseconds.
DPC Latency is in the expected range, below 300. The Gaming 7 Pro was a middle of the pack result of 265 microseconds. No issues here either.
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Lord of the Bored - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - link
You misunderstand. It isn't about whether it inconveniences or affects them in any way. It is about needing a reason to bitch about something.WinterCharm - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
> adds next to no priceCitation needed.
timecop1818 - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
Fucking killer NIC. That shit cannot die soon enough. Why even waste space on that, even 10GbE and an intel 1GbE would make more sense.I was looking at Gigabyte boards a bit ago and anything with decent features was ruined by KillerShit, so I switched to ASUS for PRO/A series without dumb shit thrown in.
Ian Cutress - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
I'll forward your concerns to Rivet. Anything specific you don't like about Killer, especially the latest hardware?PeachNCream - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
Hey Ian, since Joe has the hardware already, is it possible for Anandtech to do some more in-depth benchmarking of the Killer ethernet and wireless cards on this motherboard? Internet gaming tests under real world conditions might help us put Killer's value proposition into perspective.oRAirwolf - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
I agree with peachncream. Killer has made some absolutely awful networking products in the past that were further crippled by their horrendous drivers and unnecessary software. It has left a bad taste in everybody's mouth and very few if any PC enthusiasts are happy to see their products in a motherboard. From what I see online, it seems as though most people either don't install their software or uninstall it if it comes pre-packaged. Rather than forwarding complaints to deaf ears at Rivet Networks, it would make a lot more sense to do some very detailed benchmarking, including Aquantia's new chipsets, showing the pros and cons of each solution and the impact they have on things like latency, CPU usage, bandwidth, and game perfomance. I am especially interested to see some benchmarks pitting the new Aquantia chipsets against Intel's 10gbe offerings like the X540, X550, and X710 with RJ45 ports.Notmyusualid - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - link
I disagree.There is nothing wrong with their hardware in my opinion.
Just install the basic driver, or the Qualcomm driver, and you will be unable to tell the difference from your typical Intel NIC, on any consumer device. You don't have to install their network suite.
Meanwhile I've had no end of trouble with my X540 10Gb/s NICs. So much so - I returned it for replacement. And whilst I've not been home yet to try the replacement, I'm not confident of good results.
HobartTas - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - link
Hello Ian from Australia! I signed up just now to reply to your question to timecop1818 and I'll give you my impression of previous killer standalone $200 network cards and their embedded chipset Ethernet products. Basically the product is of no real benefit over any other networking product and in one specific case I'll mention later on completely useless. It supposedly originally prioritized gaming packets within the machine over other traffic which might have been of some use at a lan event where you bring your own machine but then you probably wouldn't be using your machine for anything else at the time so gaming traffic was probably all that was going out over the network anyway, so no benefit there and these days most people do their gaming over the internet anyway.When I only had 8/1 Adsl1 and (max speed) 12/1 Adsl2 available for internet the same would apply as you couldn't do anything else because even if you downloaded other stuff at say 50% of Adsl download speed the 50 byte acknowledgement packets going out to request the next packet be sent down to you would blow out pings from 40-60 to 200 as the upload speed of 1 Mbit was just way too slow and congestion occurred (think goat track compared to 8 lane freeway) so again I'm left with just gaming traffic only because I couldn't do anything else so no benefit over any other ethernet chipset again.
Now that I'm on fibre at 100/40 and I have a truckload of bandwidth I can be gaming and also downloading Nvidia drivers at 11 MB's and gaming pings only slightly rise from 22 to 26 so killer is not needed at all again as any other Ethernet chipset will do just fine.
Software: According to their website https://www.killernetworking.com/driver-downloads it's windows only and nothing else. I have a 4930K and a Gigabyte X79S-UP5-WIFI board which has both Intel and Realtek ethernet connectors on it and that's my Windows 7 gaming machine. My other identical board has an I7-3820 cpu and I'm testing Solaris 11.3 as a ZFS NAS and for whatever reason the Intel Ethernet connector came up as "mis-configured" and I couldn't work out why that was so I plugged in the network cable into the other Realtek connector and off I went. If I had a killer ethernet instead of Realtek I'd either have to figure out the Intel mis-configuration or get another Gbe network card (probably Intel) and plug it in as Killer have no Solaris, BSD or Linux drivers which is pretty useless of them.
For those people who find that Gbe isn't fast enough and are looking at 10Gbe that's not expensive the speed increase stated on their webpage https://www.killernetworking.com/products/killer-e... going from 940 Mbs to 1102 Mbs may as well be totally insignificant as all it is is just re-inventing the existing wheel. I picked up about a year ago very cheap (approx USD$ 50) Mellanox QDR infiniband cards when they deprecated the technology and these cards are 40 Gbs Infiniband/10 Gbs Ethernet capable so if this chipset actually was 100 Base T (or even 50 or 25) then and only then would I possibly be interested as probably would other people as well.
No one wants to muck around with a "control center" for Ethernet as I just want the network to "just work" when I plug the cable in and I'm happy with some crappy no-name no-brand software TCP/IP stack that works reliably even if it only goes at say 90% of maximum speed. I hope its not anywhere near as useless as the Nvidia Firewall software I once had the misfortune to install as it completely stuffed up my network port and rendered it non-functional which still didn't work even after I uninstalled the software and I had to reformat the hard drive and re-install windows to fix that problem.
Anyway that's everything that's CURRENTLY wrong with this product and nothing that's right with it as I have explained in detail above, If they posted drivers for all the other OS's then it might get half way to being merely usable. Feel free to pass my entire comment over to Rivet and I look forward to any reply to any part of my comments posted back here but I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of that.
Cheers
Strunf - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - link
They are the answer to a non existant problem... or better the real problem is the Internet speeds people have and there's nothing Killer can do about it. People that have slow internet already turn off any sharing software when they play games and those that have a fast one don't care cause they have more than enough, those in-between will just turn off any bandwidth hungry apps just for a piece of mind.On bittorrent if you share at a very slow speeds, as would be the case if you play and torrent at the same time on a slow connection no one will connect to you or kick you if the speeds are too low, no one wants to spend time and resources on a connection that is as fast as a snail.
Tamz_msc - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
From what I have read recently Killer LAN is mostly fine as long as you don't install their software. Linux support might be spotty though.