The workstation server market is one that has been neglected in the mainstream technical media. Yes there are a few “upper-end” sites that cover the workstation arena but they tend be a little snobby at times and almost always talk over the heads of the average consumer. So we are going to try and bring some of that talk to you in plain English. To kick things off we have a very nice product. This is the first Dual socket 1366 motherboard in a standard ATX package. It has been brought to you by the Asus Work Station team. These guys are a very talented bunch and have made some workstation products that can even compete head to head with some of the Republic of Games boards that Asus has. So let’s introduce to you the Asus Z8NA-D6C.
PCMark Vantage -PCMark Vantage is a suite of tests designed to test the power of your computer. It runs task that range from productivity to gaming (DX9 only). It is a great test to identify potential problem areas with general performance on a system. It can also show how well a single component can increase or decrease system-wide performance. We run both the x86 and x64 PCMark Suites for testing.
The scores here are not good at all. I honestly expected to see much higher given the extra CPU cores/threads available. However, I think what we are seeing here is PCMark Vantage operating only on CPU0. This means that it is running 8 threads at 2.4GHz instead of 16. This would cause many of the simulated applications to run significantly slower than they should. Especially when we compare them to a 12 thread 3.3GHz CPU.
3DMark Vantage -3DMark Vantage is the other FutureMark test that we run on our motherboards. This test simulates the typical tasks that a GPU (and system) would have to perform to provide you with a good gaming experience. It is based on the DX9 and DX10 engines but can only be installed on Windows Vista or later. The suite of tests covers DX9 rendering, DX10 rendering, AI computations and PhysX. The problem with the PhysX calculations is that nVidia owns that technology. This gives them an upper hand in the test runs, for this reason we will always run 3DMark Vantage with GPU PhysX enabled and disabled when we use an nVidia GPU in our testing. As we currently use an HD 5870 this will not be an issue for now.
Although the 3DMark sores are not bad here they are off by about 1k GPU points. When you combine that with the lower than expected CPU score you get numbers that are below the consumer board. However, we have to say that this is not aimed at the enthusiast or gamer market. It is aimed at the professional workstation and server market, so 3DMark Vantage scores are not high on the list of priorities to be perfectly honest.
HyperPi 0.99bHyperPi is a front end application that allows you to easily run multiple instances of the SuperPi application. SuperPi, for those that are not familiar with it, is an application that measures the time it takes to calculate the number Pi out to as many as 32 million places. This calculation is then checked and run multiple times (up to 24 for a 32M run). This test stresses the CPU, Memory and HDD as data is handed off between the three. If there is a weak link, HyperPi will show it. For our testing we run the 32M test on as many cores (and threads) as the CPU has available. The slowest CPU time is then recorded.
Here the times we see are a reflection of RAW CPU power and memory speed. As the L5530s are 2.4GHz they are behind the power curve when compared to the 3.3GHz 980X. We also have some memory items to consider even with NUMA enabled. You have to take ECC into account here along with the actual speed of the RAM. Considering that the X58 test systems were running at least 1333MHz with no error correction to get in the way the HyperPi times are not too bad.
Cinebench R11.5-Cinenbench R11.5 is the 11th release of Moxon’s rendering test. This test is based off of the Cinema 4D engine, which is one of the industry standard tools for digital animation. It is a powerful product with many different modules that can be “plugged” into it to increase its effectiveness. With Cinebench you get to see how your computer would do using this application. There are two tests; one tests the CPU’s ability to render an image across multiple cores or threads. The other tests your systems ability to handle OpenGL based rendering.
The stock scores here are quite impressive given the differences in CPU speed between the X58 systems and the Z8NA-D6C. It takes pushing the 980X CPUs out to beyond 4GHz to really pull ahead of the dual Xeon Z8NA. You would probably get some excellent performance out of this board if digital animation and rendering is your thing.
