Sm Bus Controller Asrock

[Rosalyn Pomposo]

Fora number of months I have been wondering when 10GBase-T would be getting some prime time in the consumer market. Aside from add-in cards, there was no onboard solution, until ASRock announced the X99 WS-E/10G. We were lucky enough to get one in for review.

10GBase-T is somewhat of an odd standard. Based on upgraded RJ-45 connections, it pushes the standard of regular wired networking in terms of performance and capability. The controllers required for it are expensive, as the situations that normally require this bandwidth tend to use different standards that afford other benefits such as lower power, lower heat generation and more efficient signaling standards. Put bluntly, 10GBase-T is hot, power hungry, expensive, but ultimately the easiest to integrate into a home, small office or prosumer environment. Users looking into 10GBase-T calculate cost in hundreds of monies per port, rather than pennies, as the cheapest unmanaged switches cost $800 or so. A standard two port X540-T2 PCIe 2.0 x8 card can cost $400-800 depending on your location, meaning a minimum $2000 for a 3 system setup.

The benefits of 10GBase-T outside the data center sound somewhat limited. It doesn't increase your internet performance, as that is determined by the line outside the building. For a home network, its best use is in computer to computer data transfer. Normally a prosumer environment might have a server or workstation farm for large dataset analysis and GBit just isn't enough. Or the most likely home scenario is streaming lossless 4K content to several devices at once. For most users this sounds almost a myth, but for a select few it is a reality, or at least something near it. Some users are teaming individual GBit ports for similar connectivity as well.

Moving the 10GBase-T controller and ports ultimately frees up PCIe slots for other devices, and makes integration easier, although you lose the ability to transfer the card to another machine if needed. The X540-BT2 used in the X99 WS-E/10G has eight PCIe 3.0 lanes on a 40 PCIe lane CPU, but can also work with four lanes via the 28-lane i7-5820K CPU if required. Using the controller on the motherboard also helps with pricing, providing an integrated system and hopefully shaving $100 or so from the ultimate cost. That being said, as it ends up in the high end model, it is aimed at those where hardware cost is a minimal part of their prosumer activities, where an overclocked i7-5960X system with 4+ PCIe devices is par for the course.

Due to the cost of the 10GBase-T controller, the Intel X540-BT2, ASRock understandably went high-end in their first implementation. This means a full PCIe 3.0 x16/x16/x16/x16 layout due to the use of two PLX 8747 chips that act as FIFO buffer/muxes to increase the lane count. For those new to PLX 8747 chips, we went in-depth on their function when they were first released which you can read here. These PLX chips also are quite expensive, at least adding $40 each to the cost of the board for the consumer, but allow ASRock to implement top inter-GPU bandwidth. This means that from the 40 PCIe lanes of an LGA2011-3 CPU, 8 go to the X540-BT2 and 16 each go to the PLX chips which output 32 each. For users wanting to go all out with single slot PCIe co-processors, the X99 WS-E/10G will allow an x16/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8 arrangement.

Performance wise, ASRock uses an aggressive form of MultiCore Turbo to score highly in our CPU tests. Due to the 10G controller, the power consumption is higher than other motherboards we have tested, and it also impacts the DPC Latency. USB 2.0 speed was a little slow, and the audio had a low THD+N result, but POST times were ballpark for X99. The software and BIOS from ASRock followed similarly from our previous ASRock X99 WS review.

The 10GBase-T element of the equation was interesting, given that for PC-to-PC individual transfers from RAMDisk to RAMDisk peaked at 2.5 Gbps. To get the most from the protocol the data transfer requires several streams (more than one transfer function to allow for interleaving), at least four for 6 Gbps+ or eight for 8 Gbps+. One bottleneck in the transfer is the CPU, showing 50% load on an eight-thread VM during transfer using five streams, perhaps indicating that an overclocked CPU (or something like the i7-4790K with a higher threaded speed) might be preferable.

Whenever a motherboard company asks what a user looks for in a motherboard, I always mention that if they have a particular need, they will only look at motherboards that have the functionality. Following this, users would look choosing the right socket, then filter by price, brand, looks and reviews (one would hope in that vague order). The key point here being that the X99 WS-E/10G caters to that specific crowd that need a 10GBase-T motherboard. If you do not need it, the motherboard is overly expensive.

Motherboards with lots of additions tend to be bigger than usual, and the WS-E/10G sits in the E-ATX form factor. This allows the addition of the X540-BT2 controller and the two PLX 8747 switches with more PCB room for routing. As the 10G controller is rated at 14W at full tilt it comes covered with a large heatsink which is connected via a heatpipe to the heatsink covering the power delivery. The smaller heatsink covering the chipset and two PLX chips is not connected to the others, however it does have a small fan (which can be disconnected) to improve cooling potential.

Next to this power connector is a USB 2.0 type-A port on the motherboard itself, which we normally see on server/workstation motherboards for USB license keys or other forms of not-to-be-removed devices.

On the right hand side of the motherboard is our TPM header followed by the 24-pin ATX power connector and two USB 3.0 headers, where both of these come from the PCH. With the SATA ports there are twelve in total in this segment with the first two being powered by a Marvell controller. The next ten are from the PCH with the first six RAID capable, then the next four are not. As part of this final four there is also a SATA Express port coming from the chipset. For more connectivity we have a black SATA DOM port at the bottom of the board and a PCIe 2.0 x4 M.2 slot from the chipset supporting 2230 to 22110 sized devices. If a device is plugged into the final four SATA ports, the M.2 bandwidth drops to M.2 x2. This suggests that ASRock can partition some of the bandwidth from the second non-RAID AHCI controller in the chipset for M.2 usage, and that the second AHCI controller is in-part based on PCIe. This further implicates my prediction that the chipset is just turning into a mass of PCIe lanes / FPGA as required by the motherboard manufacturer.

At the bottom of the motherboard are our power/reset buttons alongside the two-digit debug. The two BIOS chips are also here with a BIOS select switch, two SATA-SGPIO headers, two USB 2.0 headers, a COM header, a Thunderbolt header, two of the fan headers and that ugly molex power connector. As usual the front panel audio and control headers are here too, as well as two other headers designated FRONT_LAN, presumably to allow server builders to route the signals from the network ports to LEDs on the front of the case.

The rear panel removes any PS/2 ports and gives four USB 2.0 alongside four USB 3.0, with the latter coming from an ASMedia hub. The two network ports on the left are from Intel I210 controllers, whereas the two on the right are the 10GBase-T ports from the Intel X540-BT2 controller. There is a Clear_CMOS button, an eSATA port and the audio jacks to round off the set.

The Marvell SATA 6Gb/s controller powered by HyperDuo technology brings integrated SSD acceleration technology to the mainstream consumer technology market, especially with high-end desktops and laptops, home NAS and set-top boxes and host bus adapters. Touting an enhanced CPU for unrivaled processing performance, the new solution now supports concurrent RAID 0/1 on SATA HDDs while running HyperDuo technology to enable a dual SSD + dual RAID0/1 HDD configuration. These capabilities are being further maximized through the use of technology providers across all elements of SATA technology, including Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba for hard disk drives (HDD); ASRock, ASUSTek, GIGABYTE and msi for motherboards; Micron and OCZ for SSDs..

Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) is a world leader in the development of storage, communications and consumer silicon solutions. Marvell's diverse product portfolio includes switching, transceiver, communications controller, wireless and storage solutions that power the entire communications infrastructure, including enterprise, metro, home and storage networking. As used in this release, the term "Marvell" refers to Marvell Technology Group Ltd. and its subsidiaries. For more information, visit Marvell.com.

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