The ASRock X570S PG Riptide Motherboard Review: A Wave of PCIe 4.0 Support on A Budget
by Gavin Bonshor on October 22, 2021 9:00 AM ESTGaming Performance
World of Tanks enCore
Albeit different to most of the other commonly played MMO or massively multiplayer online games, World of Tanks is set in the mid-20th century and allows players to take control of a range of military based armored vehicles. World of Tanks (WoT) is developed and published by Wargaming who are based in Belarus, with the game’s soundtrack being primarily composed by Belarusian composer Sergey Khmelevsky. The game offers multiple entry points including a free-to-play element as well as allowing players to pay a fee to open up more features. One of the most interesting things about this tank based MMO is that it achieved eSports status when it debuted at the World Cyber Games back in 2012.
World of Tanks enCore is a demo application for a new and unreleased graphics engine penned by the Wargaming development team. Over time the new core engine will implemented into the full game upgrading the games visuals with key elements such as improved water, flora, shadows, lighting as well as other objects such as buildings. The World of Tanks enCore demo app not only offers up insight into the impending game engine changes, but allows users to check system performance to see if the new engine runs optimally on their system.
Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
F1 2018
Aside from keeping up-to-date on the Formula One world, F1 2017 added HDR support, which F1 2018 has maintained; otherwise, we should see any newer versions of Codemasters' EGO engine find its way into F1. Graphically demanding in its own right, F1 2018 keeps a useful racing-type graphics workload in our benchmarks.
Aside from keeping up-to-date on the Formula One world, F1 2017 added HDR support, which F1 2018 has maintained. We use the in-game benchmark, set to run on the Montreal track in the wet, driving as Lewis Hamilton from last place on the grid. Data is taken over a one-lap race.
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Arbie - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
$185 - which you could spend on a set of aluminum lawn chairs. I am continually astounded that an ultra-high tech assembly like this, with hundreds of parts each microscopically created, comprising millions of transistors, and with multiple PCB layers, countless holes precisely drilled, and the whole thing electrically and electronically designed, all the drawings, BOM, logistics, testing etc, can appear on a shelf here at this price. Or at twice the price. Or three times.Just an observation...
meacupla - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
That's because your aluminum lawn chairs are overpriced, and have significantly better margins. They probably only cost around $20 to make, $30 to ship, and $30 to store in a your local warehouse, until you bought them. That leaves more than a 50% profit margin for the manufacturer.Where as Mobos have significantly less margin. Mobo makers only have around 10% profit per sale of a mobo, and less than 8% on graphics cards, by the time you can buy one locally. This is also the reason why it's so hard to get RMAs on mobos and graphics cards for certain manufacturers.
Arbie - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
So if lawn chairs cost half as much, mobos would be 0.5 x 10^6 more complex per dollar, instead of 1.0 x 10^6. I get it.TheITS - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
It's much more logically explained by economies of scale, not complexity.Arbie - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
I doubt that orders of magnitude more "ASRock X570S PG Riptide" mobos will be sold than say "Walmart Model XYZ" lawnchair sets. There are major economies of scale in the electronic subcomponents, but the lawnchairs have some too.Overall, I can far more easily see how lawnchairs might arrive at such a price than how a mobo can. In fact the latter appears miraculous compared to almost anything within 10x its price.
Wrs - Saturday, October 23, 2021 - link
Bulk is a primary cost factor for lawn chairs made abroad. It limits how many products you can pack per container for shipment. For a typical product originating from SE Asia, remember each container has to make the sea and land journey round trip. That typically ranges from $25000-40000 for a 40' truckload to the US, or $600-1000 per linear foot. This holiday season there are unusual shipping backlogs and the price has spiked to $2000 or something. Might not be the best year to get lawn chairs. A corollary is that the more compact the chairs fold or stack into, the cheaper they can be sold for.A mobo box being around 2 large books is comparatively easy to pack, but more importantly the tiny size of most of the components makes shipping costs to assembly site almost trivial. With Moore's law shrinking chips so much, one can still pack millions of transistors on a mature node for just pennies.
ballsystemlord - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
Technical correction @Gavin . You didn't mean to write "... and three PCIe 4.0 x4 slots." You intended "... and three PCIe 4.0 x1 slots".geniekid - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
How well does the GPU bracket/holder actually work?Tomatotech - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
You know, I’m reading this mobo review after reading the details of the new M1 Pro / Max SoC, and all I can think of is that this mobo looks so large and outdated.I think it’s time for processors to start being soldered on, for Intel at least, as they change their sockets so often. I’d happily buy a CPU + mobo + decent igpu + ram + a TB or 2 of SSD space onboard. The whole package should cost less than buying the parts separately and work far better.
The cheaper CPUs can come with 8GB soldered on and the better ones with 16/32/64GB RAM options. 1 TB onboard of fast soldered SSD is enough for most people, and there can still be a M2 slot for adding a few more TB.
I’m not sure how to keep the ability to add a beefy GPU, maybe have a single high speed slot, plus the ability to add a daughterboard with a few more slots if needed, connected by a TB4 cable. (TB is basically PCIe over a cable).
Won’t be to everyone’s taste but it would make life easier and cheaper. Technology marches on and HDDs no longer have replaceable platters (drums), or replaceable arms / actuators. Time to take the next step and integrate the CPU and RAM, god knows Intel’s CPUs need a better RAM connection.
isthisavailable - Saturday, October 23, 2021 - link
How about no?