Performance

For performance testing, I’ve mentioned it a lot in the past but its always good to post up a reminder. The performance between different motherboards really isn’t big unless you have one company overclocking or underclocking the CPU. So most of the testing below is just to keep everyone on the up and up and make sure there aren’t any issues. That said this is also a great look at what to expect for performance if you go with a 1080 Ti and a 7900X. First though, here are our CPUz readouts so that everyone can see our exact configuration and BIOS revision.

As for our test results, what did we end up with? Well the Strix X299-XE Gaming paired up with the 7900X and the 1080Ti is actually a bit of a monster. Performance in all of the tests is up there, at least until the next generation of GPUs hits the market. 3DMark and PCMark were both in line with everything else tested within margin. Passmark was a little higher than most of the other boards tested, but in range of what the Gigabyte board did so no issues there. Then the two games tested at highest settings were MORE than enough and perfect for today's higher refresh monitors, not bad for a single card setup. The network performance test is really the only place I see big variations and this is because some motherboards use different network chipsets and on the wireless side each company also has their own antenna design. Asus went with the Intel I219V for the hardwired NIC and its performance was right up there. I was surprised they didn’t stick with Intel on the wireless NIC like they normally do, but they went with the Realtek 8822BE that they also used on the Apex board. Its performance was better than the non-Asus boards tested mostly due to their antenna design that has given me fewer issues than the others.