Gigabyte X99 Phoenix SLI Motherboard Review
Subsystem and Gaming Benchmarks
10 Sata 6G Ports are available on the Gigabyte X99 Phoenix.
The M.2 slot on the Gigabyte X99 Phoenix SLI is the x4 variety.
USB 3.0 is tested on the Intel Chipset
On-board Audio
Before proceeding with audio benchmarks, Deferred Procedure Call latency must be first checked to make sure that the system is capable of producing useable results when the Rightmark Audio Analyzer benchmark was run. DPC is a Windows function that involves prioritizing tasks within the OS and high DPC latencies can be caused by several things including hardware device conflict. The DPC Latency Monitor graphically displays the latency level of the system in real time.
Network Connectivity
Network testing was conducted with a 8-port Cisco 2960G network switch and a pair of 6-ft long Cat5E cables connecting the server PC and the test motherboard. The server system is running an Intel Core i7-5820K processor on an MSI X99A Gaming 9 ACK motherboard with the onboard killer network card disabled and a PCIe Intel Dual port server card. Interrupt Moderation was disabled, running TCP and UDP tests.
Intel i218:
Intel i211:
For wireless testing, an Asus RT-AC87U was configured as a wireless access point and plugged into the Cisco 2960G switch.
Gaming Tests
Futuremark’s 3DMark is a semi-synthetic gaming benchmark that calculates both graphics and CPU-bound physics in a controlled series of tests and provides scores that can be compared with other gaming platforms. Unigine Heaven is a synthetic benchmark that is completely GPU bound for testing possible PCI-E graphics performance inconsistencies.
A gaming test run for Bioshock Infinite at the lowest resolution and settings was performed as well as a test with maximum details at a 1920 x 1080 resolution. CPU performance difference can be gauged due to the reduced reliance on the discrete GPU at those low levels theoretically but a high resolution benchmark was also conducted to see if there are inconsistencies with PCI-E graphics performance.
