ASRock Rack B550D4-4L Motherboard Review: B550 Goes Professional with BMC
by Gavin Bonshor on May 20, 2021 9:00 AM ESTCPU 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 put the memory settings at the CPU manufacturers suggested frequency, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
For B550 we are running using Windows 10 64-bit with the 1909 update.
Rendering - Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite - link
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing - 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.
Compression – WinRAR 5.60b3: 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.
Synthetic – 7-Zip v1805: link
Out of our compression/decompression tool tests, 7-zip is the most requested and comes with a built-in benchmark. For our test suite, we’ve pulled the latest version of the software and we run the benchmark from the command line, reporting the compression, decompression, and a combined score.
It is noted in this benchmark that the latest multi-die processors have very bi-modal performance between compression and decompression, performing well in one and badly in the other. There are also discussions around how the Windows Scheduler is implementing every thread. As we get more results, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
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.
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bananaforscale - Saturday, May 22, 2021 - link
This.mode_13h - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link
> I think 2x2.5G would be more appropriate for the target market of this board.Probably the main issue is that support for 2.5 GigE is (still?) uncommon on enterprise switches.
> Anybody considering 10Gbe is likely on the verge of adopting 25/40/100G anyway
A lot of people are just starting to move up to 10 GigE. Anything faster doesn't make a lot of sense for SOHO applications.
bananaforscale - Saturday, May 22, 2021 - link
Especially considering how overpriced 10G twisted pair NICs are.mode_13h - Saturday, May 22, 2021 - link
Eh, I got a pair 2 years ago for < $100 each. I've spent more on a 3Com 10 Megabit PCI NIC, back in the late 90's. Or maybe it was 100 Mbps.Samus - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
Probably 100mbps if it was PCI. The 100Mbps ISA NICs were pretty damn pricy because by the time 100Mbps became commonplace, ISA was on its way out and PCI was becoming mainstream (Pentium-era.)Even now an 100Mbps ISA network card is $50+
PixyMisa - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link
By preference, but some datacenters use Cat6 and others use SFP. Others have already moved up to 25GbE. 10GBaseT is perfect for workstations, but not necessarily so for servers.mode_13h - Saturday, May 22, 2021 - link
> some datacenters use Cat6Really? For what? Management? Twisted-pair is very energy-intensive at 10 Gigabits, and can't go much above. So, I'd imagine they just use it for management @ 1 Gbps.
Within racks, I'd expect to see SFP+ over copper. Between racks, it's optical all the way.
Samus - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
I've toured a lot of datacenters in my lifetime and I can honestly say I haven't seen copper wiring used for anything but IPMI and in extreme cases POTS for telephone backup comms though even this is mostly dead now as it has been replaced by cellular. Even HP ILO2 supports fiber for remote management, and you can bet at the distance and energy profile data centers are working with, they use fiber wherever they can.alexey@altagon.com - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link
Agree, companies are saving money and customers are paying more.Spunjji - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
That's an opinion, for sure.