Integrated Device Testing

Audio Subsystem Testing

Audio Playback Testing

Using a selection of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal music tracks and Windows Media Player, the audio subsystem playback performance was tested for playback accuracy and fidelity.

Playback using the app provided test sounds was clear and distortion free using both the 5.1 speaker setup and the Kingston HyperX Cloud Gaming headset through the integrated analogue audio ports.

Listening tests using the selected audio tracks were performed with a Kingston HyperX Cloud Gaming audio headset as well as a 5.1 speaker setup to exercise the subsystem's audio fidelity. In both cases, audio reproduction was clear, rich, and distortion-free with the little quality difference between either output device.

Microphone Port Testing

For testing the board's Microphone input port, the microphone from a Kingston HyperX Cloud Gaming audio headset was used to capture a 10 second spoken phrase with the assistance of the Microsoft Sound Recorder application. The resulting audio file was saved to the desktop and played back using Windows Media Player.

For best audibility, Microphone Boost was enabled at +20dB with a 50% recording volume. Any lower than that caused the vocalizations to become muted. There was no negative impacts to voice or audio pickup with either the Noise Suppression or Audio Cancellation settings engaged.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

To validate that the board’s device ports were functioning correctly, we connected a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SATA III SSD to the system and ran the ATTO Disk Benchmark against the drive. The SSD was directly connected to the native SATA 3 ports, the USB 3.0 ports, and USB 3.1 Gen2 ports. NGFF port testing was performed using an M.2 based Samsung 950 Pro PCIe M.2 2280 256GB SSD. The M.2 device was tested using the board's integrated M.2 slot. USB port testing performed using the Samsung 850 EVO SSD in a USB 3.1 Gen 2 compatible enclosure. ATTO was configured to test against transfer sizes from 0.5 to 8192 KB with Total Length set to 512 MB and Queue Depth set to 10. The M.2 SSD selected for testing has a maximum read throughput of 2200 MB/s and a write throughput of 900 MB/s over a PCI-Express x4 bus. The selected SSD has a maximum read throughput of 540 MB/s and a write throughput of 520 MB/s on a SATA III controller. The drive tests were repeated three times with the highest repeatable read and write speeds recorded.

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On the Intel X99 controller, the SSD's performed equally across both the primary and secondary controllers with performance falling within limits of the drive specs. The M.2 drive performance held back by the integrated M.2 port. The onboard M.2 port was a PCIe x2 port, capable of only a 10Gb/s max transfer rate. The USB 3.x performance tests fell as expected with the drive closely approaching SATA III speeds over the USB 3.1 interface and falling under 450 MB/s over USB 3.0.

SoftPerfect Research NetWorx Speed Test

In conjunction with Windows Performance Monitor, SoftPerfect Research NetWorx Speed Meter application was used to measure the upload and download performance of the motherboards integrated network controllers. Speed Meter was used to measure average network throughput in MB/s with Windows Performance Monitor used to measure average CPU utilization during the tests.

The LanBench network benchmarking software was used to generate send and receive traffic between the local and remote systems over a five minute period with packet size set to 4096 and connection count set to 20. A LanBench server was set up on the remote system to generate or receive traffic for the tests performed. The upload and download tests were repeated three times with the highest repeatable average throughput, the lowest repeatable average CPU utilization, and lowest repeatable performance spike percentages recorded.

Note that that theoretical maximum throughput for a Gigabit Ethernet adapter is 125 MB/s (1.0 Gbps). The theoretical maximum throughput for the integrated wireless AC controller is 162.5 MB/s (1300 Mbps).

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Both Intel controllers, the I110-AT and I118-LM, performed marvelously with performance averaging 117 MB/s during download and upload tests. The Broadcom 802.11ac controller performance fell behind that of the Intel controllers, coming in at almost 85 MB/s for download and just over 75 MB/s during upload tests. However, this type of average performance for a pure wireless transfer is nothing to discount. For CPU utilization during the network tests, utilization averaged an impressive 5% or lower across all network interfaces with utilization spikes remaining under 10%.

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