ASRock X99 OC Formula Review – SSD Performance Differs Slightly With the X99

REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS

In the grand scheme of things, if you were looking to find a complete review of the X99 ASRock OC Formula motherboard, accept my apologies as I am not a motherboard reviewer.  I am also not a overclocker but it was pretty simple to reach 4.5Ghz on the 5960X chip and push our Kingston HyperX Predator DDR4 memory as well. This report might be a great example of how even the best boards can be utilized by amateur, enthusiast and extreme overclockers alike.

Now if you approached this report from the storage side of things, this report just might be of interest.  As much as it is possible that our testing could be the result of a single board, board manufacturer, or chip, we think there will be a large contingent of new X99 owners wondering why their SSD benchmarks aren’t as high as they were with their previous boards.  Imagine creating a new build with this board and seeing lower Intel P3700 NVMe SSD performance than you had on your former build; that complaint is already out there.  Closer to home, image wondering why that new Samsung XP941 won’t even hit 100MB/s in low 4K random write performance.  These are the things that can drive PC geeks nuts.

Looking at the overall storage benchmarks though, the X99 seems to shift disk access performance from one angle to another, and in fact, might be of great benefit depending on the task at hand. Sure it is easy to focus on that XP941 M.2 low random 4K result of 80MB/s, but examining the entire benchmark displays better performance all around.  In fact, when we examine the AS SSD of the NVMe drive, Total Points went from 3869 originally to 4442 with the new OS in the X99 system.  That is a significant jump. We just won’t be seeing those optimized results that we have become used to; the test with the Samsung 840 Pro SSD was proof of that.

What I like most about this board is that ASRock has once again stepped things up and, not only included two M.2 X4 slots, but they also took the next step to incorporate M.2 PCIe Gen 3.0.  This speaks to innovation, as much as it does ASRock’s efforts to be the top dog motherboards.  Small things such as the ability to reset to UEFI by USB or a dedicated button have proven their use already, just as the ease in pushing this board to 4.5Ghz, made understanding the ASRock OC Formula X99 motherboard within the grasp of just about any PC user.

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