akula2 :
Hey Crashman,
Why not go for Asrock vs Asus board comparison series by picking a few categories such as:
Extreme or Workstation class
Gaming
Budget or Executive class
I also believe the motherboard testing methodology needs to be in more sync with the real world performance delivery. E.g.,
a) PCIe lane(s) performance & bottlenecks
b) USB 3.1 vs USB 3.0 or whatever
c) Flash storage, say M.2 or NVMe performance.
d) Onboard Video & cons. E.g., multiple display performance (fps) etc.
e) Sound delivery and quality (noise etc)
f) Advanced BIOS features such as RAMDisk results and so on.
g) Video performance: Say, full HD streaming devices
h) multiple PCI performance & cons: E.g., GPU + HDTV Tuner card.
I've a few more to add here. I hope you'll add more real world numbers in the upcoming motherboard reviews.
You won't like the answers. Asus won't do a head-to-head with ASRock but we're thinking about buying some additonal Asus boars (probably in the $100-200 range so we can afford more models) to use in individual reviews.
A.) That sounds like a good tech series for chipsets. There's no difference between two boards with the same lane configuration, but we're considering a new article focusing on the two Z170 3-way SLI boards we have (since the switch is configured differently for those two boards). Notice that both of these articles would be separate from reviews?
B.) I occasionally request an update from our storage team. This is specific to the controller and test device, not the motherboard, so again we'd be seeing a separate article.
C.) See B
D.) This is CPU-dependent. The best hope I could have for differentiating between two boards is to verification-test HDMI 2.0 capability. I'll ask the boss to send me the correct monitor.
E.) I will discuss this with my motherboard team. It's something we did in the past with RMAA, where I was frustrated by the difference usually being too small to add to the value discussion (how much is 0.02% worth). Also frustrating was that I had to output a single channel to the input (loop back mode) and couldn't tell whether the input or output was most-responsible for those tiny differences (yes, I gave up in frustration, maybe you can advise).
F.) I should probably mention these more-often. It's RAMdisk. The files read faster than the CPU can process them. So I've only validated that it works.
G.) See D.
H.) You do know that the GPU gets its own PCIe controller?
One of our motherboard guys has expressed an interest in examining PCIe performance through the PCH. Next time we talk, I'll give him the green light