Asrock X99E-itx/ac & GeForce 1080 Speed Issues...

I have just purchased and installed the Asrock X99E-itx/ac motherboard along with a Xeon 2683v3 Processor, 32GB Trident-X Memory and Nvidia 1080 Seahawk X water-cooled graphics card. However, the performance of the Geforce 1080 Seahawk X card and the 32GB Trident-X Memory is 50% slower than it should be? Would there be any reason for this? Is the graphics card and memory too powerful for the motherboard? Please help...

1. I wouldn't use Passmark for 3D testing, it's not very good. Use 3DMark Firestrike instead. You can download it for free from Steam (3DMark Demo). Once you've run the standard Firestrike, you can compare it to other people's results on similar systems and see if there's a difference. So far there seems to be only one validated run with a Xeon 2683 v3 processor with 3DMark score of ~16 000 and graphics score of ~22 000.

2. The motherboard shouldn't be bottlenecking anything, unless you have a lot of hardware using your PCIe lanes. If you just have the GTX 1080, then the PCIe 3.0 is more than enough.

3. Your CPU is a bottleneck for the GTX 1080, since its single thread performance is less than stellar (more in line with what AMD processors offer). Games generally do not take advantage of more than 4 cores, so for gaming the Xeon is not the best choice. However, you should still be looking at performance similar to an FX-9590, so you don't really need to despair. An i7-6700K would give you ~20 000 in Firestrike instead of ~16 000, but that 25% increase is likely smaller in games and you should still be getting good FPS.

4. If your memory is running at half speed, you're probably looking at the memory frequency. If you have the Trident-X DDR4 2800 modules, then that 2800 refers to the data rate in MT/s (megatransfers per second), not the clock speed. The DDR in the DDR4 means double data rate, so the actual clock speed is half of the given data rate. If you're seeing your memory running at 1400 MHz, then all should be fine.

5. What sort of PSU do you have? What are your GPU temperatures when the GPU is under load?


Edited by PetrolHead - 08 Aug 2016 at 6:37am