ASRock 890FX Deluxe: Comprehensive Motherboard Review & Investigation of Thuban Performance Scaling
by Rajinder Gill on August 31, 2010 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- ASRock
- AMD
- Motherboards
- 890FX
We now follow up with our usual system evaluation suit to test ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4 and pit it against ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 . For this part of the test, we enabled all the power-saving features of our 1090T and Turbo Core, and Windows power plan was set to “Balanced”. We matched the 4x2GB of Corsair XMS3 sticks to DDR3-1600/7-8-7-1T on both boards using 3:12 (1:4) divider. All games were tested at their maximum graphics quality settings available in-game. Anti-aliasing was set to 4xAA when applicable, and anisotropic filtering was set to 16xAF in Catalyst Control Panel.
Application Performance - WinRAR 3.90 64-bit
This benchmark compresses our AT workload consisting of a main folder that contains 954MB of files in 15 subfolders. The result is a file approximately 829MB in size.
Application Performance - Bibble 5.0
We utilize Bibble Labs’ Bibble 5 v2 to convert 50 RAW image files into full size JPEG images with the program’s default settings. This program is fully multithreaded and multi-core aware.
Application Performance - Sorenson Squeeze 6.0
We are using Sorenson Squeeze to convert eight AVCHD videos into HD Flash videos for use on websites. This application heavily favors physical core count and processor clock speed.
Gaming Performance - Resident Evil 5
We are using the built-in benchmark utility of Capcom's highly addictive horror game.
Gaming Performance - StarCraft 2
We use the same replay file we used in part 1, but the numbers are slightly different because here our setups are devised more closely to match actual user experience. Keep in mind that Turbo Core is enabled and memory configuration is different for this part of the test. 16AF is forced from Catalyst Control Center.
USB 3.0 Performance
We use Acronis TrueImage Home (v. 10) to make a backup of our installation drive to an external SATA 3.0 Gbps drive via USB 3.0 and compare it with USB 2.0 and SATA 3.0 Gbps transfers. The total data backed up is approximately 20 GB. We could not complete the backup on the M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 in a consistent manner.
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Kane Y. Jeong - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Anand has already covered SB850 in depth, so I linked to the article.http://www.anandtech.com/show/2973/6gbps-sata-perf...
Said that, I will get back to you after contacting ASRock as to your question. Thank you.
poohbear - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
that article doesnt address how TRIM is disabled w/ the AMD drivers. It might increase performance, but with TRIM disabled it makes the SSD have terrible performance in the long term. Please bring this up in AMD chipset reviews as AMD is just ignoring the issue. its a mess.Slaimus - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
Are you talking about the RAID driver passing TRIM to the individual drives in the array? TRIM in general is working AFAIK.stuartrue - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Do the AMD AHCI drivers support the TRIM command?DWeber - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Love the extent of your articles. Clean written, good facts, interesting NB-Frequency benches.But what the f* is a Radeon HD 5780?
Egap19 - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Thank you for the throw review, but if it's first 890fx review why not asus or gigabyte? Heck MSI there too. Do a round up or something. AMD gets no love around here.BestBuyJock2 - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I love the StarCraft 2 bench. It was an eye opener. I only have an Athlon X4 but I may test the same thing. Very informative review rarely seen these days. Thank you Anandtech!cousin2003 - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
cousin2003; Very impressive article. Is the Motherboard available yet. I really learned about more about Thuben CPU's. Thank you.najames - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
It is rumored that AMD 890FX boards will allow passthrough hardware in virtual machines like Intel VT-d with some "updated BIOS", meaning a graphics card or video capture card and USB devices could be assigned in a VM. It would be nice if someone can verify this.I have briefly tried this with my Gigabyte X58-UD4P BIOS 13 and i7920 setup. It shows a virtualization option in the BIOS but Vsphere (ESXi 4.1) still shows it as unavailable. There is however a Beta BIOS I have not tried yet.
This seems to be a voodoo hit or miss on desktop computers although support goes back to the Q35 era desktop boards and servers.
beretta2013 - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
You mentioned reaching 4.1Ghz on the 1090T, was that at idle in CPU-z validator or was that under full load in prime95? My $95 GA-770TA-UD3 can validate at 4.4GHz but 3.9 is the max stable clock speed. As far as wattage being pulled, my 1090T @3.8 & 1.42v draws 177watts itself under peak load in prime95; as quoted by the Gigabyte Energy Saver app. Cheers.