discussion ASUS B150 PRO GAMING/AURA Motherboard Review

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Feature Testing: Aura RGB Lighting

Feature Testing: Aura RGB Lighting

The ASUS B150 PRO GAMING/AURA is a new class of motherboard that features a ton of LED illumination. While many motherboards over the last 1-2 years have had static unicolour LEDs lighting up the PCB audio isolation line - and this model does too - the AURA designation means it also comes with fully adjustable RGB LEDs under the PCH chipset heatsink and the top-right edge of the motherboard.

These RGB LEDs can be controlled using the new Lighting Control utility. The light can be adjusted to any number of different colours and customized to create cool lighting effects. The presets can cause the LEDs to change shades to indicate CPU temperature, pulsate with the beat of your music, cycle through all the colours, fade in and out, flash on and off, or just statically display one colour.

Click on image to enlarge​

As you can see, this extensive amount of lighting can certainly create distinctive and eye-catching visuals...even without any effects enabled and only using a single colour throughout.

Once you do make use of the huge amount of customizability, you can create some very striking visuals that will add a ton of flair to your build. Check it out below:

<iframe width="700" height="394" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YaNolXh_i_M?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>​

 

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Feature Testing: ASUS RAMCache

Feature Testing: ASUS RAMCache

The B150 PRO Gaming/Aura also comes with a very user-friendly RAMCache feature. For those not familiar with this concept, a RAMCache utilizes a portion of your RAM in order to cache your system's most commonly accessed data. Since the read, write and latency performance of RAM is exponentially faster than any conventional storage device, the use of a RAMCache can definitely speed up certain tasks. Using the included utility is as simple as selecting the storage device that you want to dedicate a cache to, and then selecting the amount of system memory to allocate to the RAMCache.

RAMCache Utility - Click on image to enlarge​

For this test, we decided to increase the installed RAM from 8GB to 16GB in order to allocate a full 8GB to the RAMCache. You can allocate much smaller amounts of system memory if you have less RAM, but that will obviously reduce the amount of data, whether it be an application or a game or even files, that can actually reside in the cache.

In order to quickly and easily tests a wide range of real-life workloads, we elected to use the storage benchmark in PCMark 8. We allocated an 8GB RAMCache to the SSD on which PCMark was installed, and we ran the benchmark three times in a row in order to allow the files to be cached. Let's see the results:

As you can see, although there was a substantial increase in the overall storage bandwidth, the actual benefit when it comes applications was actually very small in most instances. When we tried manually measuring the load times of various games the results were very similar, even when managed to load the same game a dozen times in a row over a matter of minutes.

That is not to say that the RAMCache did nothing. On the contrary, in synthetic benchmarks, the RAMCache caused our storage benchmark results go to through the roof:

Solid State Drive - RAMCache Off/On

Hard Drive - RAMCache Off/On​

As you can see, whether we allocated the cache to a solid state drive or a hard drive made zero difference in this case. Once the RAMCache was enabled the results for both were essentially identical because we were basically benchmarking the RAM's performance instead of that of the storage device.

 

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Feature Testing: M.2 - PCI-E 3.0 x2

Feature Testing: M.2 - PCI-E 3.0 x2

One of the big advancements of the Skylake LGA1151 platform was the fact that it brought the M.2 connector to the mainstream. Not only did it make this new storage connector available at a more reasonable price, but properly implemented too with a full speed PCI-E 3.0 x4 interface and support for NVMe SSDs. Regrettably, the B150 PRO GAMING/AURA falls a little short, its M.2 connector has been limited by a PCI-E 3.0 x2 interface. With that means is that instead of having a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 4GB/s, it is limited to 2GB/s. While this might seem more than adequate for most PCI-E SSDs, as you will see below it did end up being a bottleneck.

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We selected the Samsung SSD 950 PRO 256GB as our test drive because this next-generation NVMe PCI-E SSD combines Samsung's newest UBX controller with its industry-leading 3D V-NAND and is capable sequential read speeds of up to 2,200MB/second and write speeds of up to 900MB/sec.

One of the ways that we will be evaluating the performance of a motherboard's M.2 interface is by verifying if it is capable of matching these listed transfer rates. The other is by checking to see how it performs compared to the SSD 950 PRO installed onto a ASUS Hyper M.2 x4 expansion card plugged directly into a PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot. Since the B150 PRO GAMING/AURA's M.2 connector is limited to PCI-E 3.0 x2, we know that the expansion card will outperform it, but it will see interesting to see by how much.

M.2 x2 vs PCI-E x4​

As can see, the M.2 connector on the B150 PRO GAMING/AURA definitely bottlenecked our Samsung SSD 950 PRO. While this M.2 x2 interface has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 2GB/s, the sad reality is that bandwidth overhead reduced this to under 1.7GB/s. As you can see on the right, when placed in the Hyper M.2 x4 expansion card and unencumbered from bandwidth limits, the SSD was able to achieve read speeds of a little over 2.2GB/s.

While transfer rates are obviously an important metric, we figured that it was also worthwhile to take a peak at instructions per second (IOPS) to see whether there was a bottleneck there as well:

M.2 x2 vs PCI-E x4​

While there is still a performance bottleneck - as evidenced by the 39% higher 16MB read IOPS visible in the PCI-E x4 benchmark - the overall differences are minor since most of these tests aren't the type of large sequential IO transfers that could max out the interface.

So yes, the B150 PRO GAMING/AURA will hold back your new M.2 SSD if it is capable of transfer rates over 1700MB/s, but it won't have any effect when it comes to the small file transfers that these new NVMe SSDs exceed at.

 

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Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Since fewer and fewer consumers seem to be buying discrete sound cards, the quality of a motherboard's onboard audio is now more important than ever. We figured that it was worthwhile to take a closer look at just how good the analog signal quality is coming out of the onboard SupremeFX audio subsystem that is implemented on the B150 PRO GAMING/AURA.

Since isolated results don't really mean much, but we have also included some numbers from the ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme, ASUS Maximus VIII Impact, GIGABYTE Z170-HD3 DDR3, ASUS X99-A, ASUS X99-PRO, ASUS Rampage V Extreme, GIGABYTE X99-Gaming G1 WIFI, MSI X99S Gaming 7, EVGA X99 Classified, and ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboards that we have previously reviewed. The GIGABYTE Z170-HD3 motherboard is based on the Realtek ALC887, a lower-end 7.1 channel HD audio codec, whereas most of the other models in this comparison feature onboard audio solutions that are built around the higher-end Realtek ALC1150 codec, but feature different op-amps, headphone amplifiers, filtering capacitors, secondary components and layouts. The GIGABYTE X99-Gaming G1 WIFI and EVGA are both based on the same Creative Core3D CA0132 quad-core audio processor, but feature vastly different hardware implementations.

We are going to do this using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, since sound quality isn't really something that can be adequately explained with only numbers. To do this we have turned to the RightMark Audio Analyzer, basically the standard application for this type of testing.

Since all the three motherboards support very high quality 24-bit, 192kHz audio playback we selected that as the sample mode option. Basically, what this test does is pipe the audio signal from the front-channel output to the line-in input via a 3.5mm male to 3.5mm male mini-plug cable, and then RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA) does the audio analysis. Obviously we disabled all software enhancements since they interfere with the pure technical performance that we are trying to benchmark.

Click on image to enlarge and reveal additional motherboards​

Although it is not quite as good as the SupremeFX 2015 and SupremeFX Impact III implementations found on the RoG Maximus models, the 'regular' SupremeFX onboard audio proved to be very good indeed. The noise level - while still better than average - is the one area that didn't fare so well when compared to the previous motherboards that we have reviewed, and we will be examining this a little more down below.

When it comes to subjective sound quality, using our usual mix of mix of Grado SR225i and Koss PortaPro headphones, Westone UM1 IEMs, and Logitech Z-5500 5.1 speakers, the playback was clean, we could crank the volume up on our Grado's to past well enjoyable sound levels, and we couldn't pinpoint any flaws in the sound output. As usual, we aren't experts in this area, but we suspect that most owners will likewise be very happy with this motherboard's onboard audio capabilities.

Some people have expressed concern over the addition of PWM-drived LEDs on a motherboard because the LEDs themselves are electrically noisy and the PWM switching can cause problematic harmonics. As a result, we decided to test whether these LEDs had any effect on the audio output, and whether the different switching modes had any effects either. The baseline test was with all the motherboard's LED disabled, and thus obviously no lighting effects either.

Click on image to enlarge and reveal additional lighting effects​

As you can see from these numbers, any concerns over LEDs undermining sound quality have proven to be unfounded on this model.

 

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System Benchmarks

System Benchmarks

In the System and Gaming Benchmarks sections, we reveal the results from a number of benchmarks run on the ASUS B150 PRO GAMING/AURA and an Intel Core i7-6700K at default clocks. Since this motherboard features no overclocking options and a memory frequency locked at DDR4-2133, we decided to compare its performance to an equally clocked ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme. At the very least, this should illustrate whether there are any performance differences between a mainstream motherboard and a flagship model. For a thorough comparison of the Core i7-6700K versus a number of different CPUs have a look at our "The Intel i7-6700K Review; Skylake Arrives" article.

SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP

When running the SuperPI 32MB benchmark, we are calculating Pi to 32 million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system. We are running one instance of SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP. This is therefore a single-thread workload.

wPRIME 2.10

wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we're sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum. This is a highly multi-threaded workload.

Cinebench R15

Cinebench R15 64-bit
Test1: CPU Image Render
Comparison: Generated Score

The latest benchmark from MAXON, Cinebench R15 makes use of all your system's processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene using various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. This particular benchmarking can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

WinRAR x64

WinRAR x64 5.30 beta 6
Test: Built-in benchmark, processing 1000MB of data.
Comparison: Time to Finish

One of the most popular file archival and compression utilities, WinRAR's built-in benchmark is a great way of measuring a processor's compression and decompression performance. Since it is a memory bandwidth intensive workload it is also useful in evaluating the efficiency of a system's memory subsystem.

FAHBench

FAHBench 1.2.0
Test: OpenCL on CPU
Comparison: Generated Score

FAHBench is the official Folding@home benchmark that measures the compute performance of CPUs and GPUs. It can test both OpenCL and CUDA code, using either single or double precision, and implicit or explicit modeling. The single precision implicit model most closely relates to current folding performance.

HEVC Decode Benchmark v1.61

HEVC Decode Benchmark (Cobra) v1.61
Test: Frame rates at various resolution, focusing on the top quality 25Mbps bitrate results.
Comparison: FPS (Frames per Second)

The HEVC Decode Benchmark measures a system's HEVC video decoding performance at various bitrates and resolutions. HEVC, also known as H.265, is the successor to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) standard and it is very computationally intensive if not hardware accelerated. This decode test is done entirely on the CPU.

LuxMark v3.0

Test: OpenCL CPU Mode benchmark of the LuxBall HDR scene.
Comparison: Generated Score

LuxMark is a OpenCL benchmarking tool that utilizes the LuxRender 3D rendering engine. Since it OpenCL based, this benchmark can be used to test OpenCL rendering performance on both CPUs and GPUs, and it can put a significant load on the system due to its highly parallelized code.

PCMark 8

PCMark 8 is the latest iteration of Futuremark’s system benchmark franchise. It generates an overall score based upon system performance with all components being stressed in one way or another. The result is posted as a generalized score. In this case, we tested with both the standard Conventional benchmark and the Accelerated benchmark, which automatically chooses the optimal device on which to perform OpenCL acceleration.

AIDA64 Memory Benchmark

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a diagnostic and benchmarking software suite for home users that provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives.

The benchmarks used in this review are the memory bandwidth and latency benchmarks. Memory bandwidth benchmarks (Memory Read, Memory Write, Memory Copy) measure the maximum achievable memory data transfer bandwidth. The code behind these benchmark methods are written in Assembly and they are extremely optimized for every popular AMD, Intel and VIA processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86/x64, x87, MMX, MMX+, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE4.1, AVX, and AVX2 instruction set extension.
The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU.

 

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Gaming Benchmarks

Gaming Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark (2013)

3DMark v1.1.0
Graphic Settings: Fire Strike Preset
Rendered Resolution: 1920x1080
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark is the brand new cross-platform benchmark from the gurus over at Futuremark. Designed to test a full range of hardware from smartphones to high-end PCs, it includes three tests for DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 hardware, and allows users to compare 3DMark scores with other Windows, Android and iOS devices. Most important to us is the new Fire Strike preset, a DirectX 11 showcase that tests tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Like every new 3DMark version, this test is extremely GPU-bound, but it does contain a heavy physics test that can show off the potential of modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark 11

3DMark 11 v1.0.5
Graphic Settings: Extreme Preset
Resolution: 1920x1080
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark 11 is Futuremark's very latest benchmark, designed to tests all of the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. At the moment, it is lot more GPU-bound than past versions are now, but it does contain a terrific physics test which really taxes modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage v1.1.2
Graphic Settings: Performance Preset
Resolution: 1280x1024

Test: Specific CPU Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score

3DMark Vantage is the follow-up to the highly successful 3DMark06. It uses DirectX 10 exclusively so if you are running Windows XP, you can forget about this benchmark. Along with being a very capable graphics card testing application, it also has very heavily multi-threaded CPU tests, such Physics Simulation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which makes it a good all-around gaming benchmark.

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark
Resolution: 1920x1080
Anti-Aliasing: 4X
Anisotropic Filtering: 8X
Graphic Settings: High

Comparison: Particle Performance Metric

Originally intended to demonstrate new processing effects added to Half Life 2: Episode 2 and future projects, the particle benchmark condenses what can be found throughout HL2:EP2 and combines it all into one small but deadly package. This test does not symbolize the performance scale for just Episode Two exclusively, but also for many other games and applications that utilize multi-core processing and particle effects. As you will see the benchmark does not score in FPS but rather in its own "Particle Performance Metric", which is useful for direct CPU comparisons.

X3: Terran Conflict

X3: Terran Conflict 1.2.0.0
Resolution: 1920x1080
Texture & Shader Quality: High
Antialiasing 4X
Anisotropic Mode: 8X
Glow Enabled

Game Benchmark
Comparison: FPS (Frames per Second)

X3: Terran Conflict (X3TC) is the culmination of the X-series of space trading and combat simulator computer games from German developer Egosoft. With its vast space worlds, intricately detailed ships, and excellent multi-threaded game engine, it remains a great test of modern CPU performance.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward Benchmark

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward
Resolution: 1920x1080
Texture & Shader Quality: Maximum IQ
DirectX 11
Fullscreen

Game Benchmark
Comparison: Generated Score

Square Enix released this benchmarking tool to rate how your system will perform in Heavensward, the expansion to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. This official benchmark software uses actual maps and playable characters to benchmark gaming performance and assign a score to your PC.

Grand Theft Auto V

DirectX Version: DirectX 11
Resolution: 1920x1080
FXAA: On
MSAA: X4
NVIDIA TXAA: Off
Anisotropic Filtering: X16
All advanced graphics settings off.

In GTA V, we utilize the handy in-game benchmarking tool. We do three full runs of the benchmark and average the results of pass 3 since they are the least erratic.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Resolution: 1920x1080
Graphical Quality: Custom
Mesh/Shadow/Texture Filtering/Vegetation Range: Ultra
Lighting/Texture Quality/Ambient Occlusion: High
Depth of Field/Order Independent Transparency/Tesselation: Enabled

With its high resolution textures and several other visual tweaks, Shadow of Mordor’s open world is also one of the most detailed around. This means it puts massive load on graphics cards and should help point towards which GPUs will excel at next generation titles. We do three full runs of the benchmark and average the results.

 

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Voltage Regulation / Power Consumption

Voltage Regulation

Since it is a mainstream model, the B150 PRO GAMING/AURA does not have any of the onboard voltage measurement points that we usually rely on in order to accurately measure the various system voltages. As a result, in this abbreviated overview, we utilized the AIDA64 System Stability Test to put a very substantial load on the system while also monitoring the stability of the all-important CPU vCore line. This testing was achieved with a 60 minute run. Regrettably, since this model doesn't support any overclocking we could not increase the amount of load on the motherboard's voltage regulation components.

Since we weren't overclocking, we also decided to not manually enable Load-Line Calibration (LLC) setting either. A certain amount of voltage droop is part Intel's specifications, and the end result is the very slight amount of rippling that you are seeing throughout the test. There is nothing worrisome or unusual here. It should be mentioned that the above only represents an approximately 15 minute portion of the 60 minute run, but it is representative of the whole test.


Power Consumption

For this section, every energy saving feature was enabled in the BIOS and the Windows power plan was changed from High Performance to Balanced. For our idle test, we let the system idle for 15 minutes and measured the peak wattage through our UPM EM100 power meter. For our CPU load test, we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs on all available threads, measuring the peak wattage via the UPM EM100 power meter. For our overall system load test, we ran Prime 95 on all available threads while simultaneously loading the GPU with 3DMark Vantage - Test 6 Perlin Noise.

With the LEDs on, but no effects enabled, the B150 PRO GAMING/AURA achieved solid power consumption numbers. As expected, the numbers were quite a bit lower than that of the Maximus VIII Extreme which has a bunch of additional controllers and capabilities. Turning off the LEDs did not have an appreciable or even measureable difference on power consumption, nor did enabling any of the various lighting effects.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), RGB LED lighting was all the rage. Some may lament this new trend, but no one can accuse ASUS of simply jumping on the bandwagon since they actually announced the B150 PRO GAMING/AURA all the way back in November. Unlike many others, we aren't offended by the arrival of this new "it" feature - more consumer choices is always a good thing - and we are quite pleased with the way AURA was implemented on this motherboard. The lights are bright, the colour selection is vast, and the lighting effects are pleasant. We only wish that the LEDs that light up the audio shielding line on the bottom left were also of the RGB variety instead of being red. It can kind of ruin the overall effect, but thankfully those red LEDs can be totally disabled.

Once we leave the realm of aesthetics, the $130 USD / $180 CAD ASUS B150 PRO GAMING/AURA reveals itself to be a well designed motherboard that is regrettably hampered by the mainstream B150 chipset. The lack of overclocking, the locked DDR4-2133 memory speed, the lack of multi-GPU support, the bandwidth-limited M.2 connector, the lack of RAID, these are all limitations caused by the chipset, not anything that ASUS has done wrong.

For those who love everything about this motherboard aside from those limitations, ASUS has another motherboard for you, the Z170 PRO GAMING. It is basically a clone of this model, but it is based on the Z170 chipset and lacks AURA lighting. It also retails for about $40 USD / $55 CAD more, so there is a not insignificant price difference. For everyone else - in other words the vast majority of gamers who don't overclock and who have never even considered installing more than one graphics card - the B150 PRO GAMING/AURA has a lot to offer.

The onboard SupremeFX audio is distinctly above-average for a motherboard in this price range, highlighted by an excellent onboard headphone amplifier, and support for the Sonic Radar II in-game sound detection feature. The Intel-powered gigabit LAN port ensures best possible throughput and reliability, while the hardware-based LANGuard protects from EMI and power surges. Those who want additional networking control and monitoring capabilities will be well served by the included GameFirst III packet prioritization utility.

When it comes to performance, this model didn't fare so well against the Maximus VIII Extreme, but it was very much inline with what we would expect from a B150-based motherboard. While the Extreme - and nearly all Z170 motherboards on the market - uses more aggressive Turbo profiles than what Intel specifies, a B150 motherboard cannot do this since it lacks any such overclocking capabilities. The performance of the M.2 connector was a slight disappointment to us, since it bottlenecked the transfer speeds of our Samsung SSD 950 PRO to just 1.67GB/s instead of its usual 2.2GB/s. Although this is once again a limitation caused by the B150 chipset, we wish that ASUS had devised a way to allow users to disable all unneeded slots and ports in order to free up bandwidth and allow the M.2 interface to run at its proper PCI-E 3.0 x4 speeds.

Now there are certainly Z170 motherboards in the same price range as the B150 PRO GAMING/AURA, but none have similar onboard audio or networking capabilities, or USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C, or water pump and thermal sensors headers, or high-end aesthetics with fully adjustable AURA RGB LED lighting. If you can live with its limitations, and can make use of its advantages, this is definitely a motherboard worth considering.