ASRock Z170M Extreme4: subpar disk reading speed

matth wrote: Hello, I'm interested in the above-mentioned mainboard. Unfortunately it shows subpar performance in a benchmark of disk reading speed in a review of another board. See the graphs for CrystalDiskMark Seq Read benchmark (third from above) where the ASRock Z170m (green bar) is equally far behind two other boards: http://www.hardwareslave.com/reviews/hardware/mobos/asus-z170m-plus-motherboard-review/6/ Apparently this is due to some bug. There seems to be no technical reason for this. Is this known and was this already solved in a Bios-update?

What is the evidence for the result being due to some bug?

Or do you mean the reviewer did not attempt to find a technical reason for it? Such as CPU power saving options (C States) having the same settings (Enabled or Disabled) in their UEFIs? C States cause latency that is shown in disk benchmark results.

Reminds me of other reviews, where the default BCLK when set on Auto was somewhat above 100MHz on at least one competitors board, compared to ASRock. The result, faster CPU and IO performance at the same multipliers.

Or another competitor's board had the Multi Core Enhancement feature enabled by default, giving the processor a higher default speed than the other boards.

At least one review site mentioned that feature was enabled by default in their review, but left it that way because they test hardware as "delivered by the manufacture". So deliver it to us tweaked, and we'll test it that way.

It's a lot of work adjusting BIOS options to identical settings. Auto can be enabled or disabled, so must be checked if Auto is the default. Plus there are BIOS settings we don't even see, or know what the are set to. The more variables and unknowns in the mix, the less likely the results are meaningful. They could be correct, but who knows?

Meanwhile, people just look at the graphs, and draw conclusions from them alone. Truth is in the details... if the details are there.