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
After two weeks of being abused, ASRock’s 890FX Deluxe 4 proved to be a worthy contender in the market where users are looking for a home of their brand new Thuban CPU. It wasn’t without its share of issues, though, and we want to disclose at this point that we lost our first deluxe 4 during testing. According to ASRock the board was a pre-retail board and we saw a few physical differences between the first and second board, so we do believe it.
When we compared ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4 and ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 through our benchmark suit, there was an interesting pattern. In applications that can take advantage of all 6 cores, the 890FX Deluxe 4 equaled, if not exceled by a thin hair, the M4A89GTD Pro/USB3. When not all CPU cores were busy, however, the M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 consistently pulled out better scores. The difference is small, but it is there nonetheless. We suspect that ASUS’ expertise in BIOS tuning is at work here, either for faster memory access or better Turbo Core implementation.
What we did not expect was that a similar pattern would emerge from our CPU-NB testing. Our experiment with Thuban’s CPU-NB was truly strange. In applications that can take advantage of as many cores as 6, the gains achieved by CPU-NB overclocking was rather small. It’s there, but not to the point of writing home about. On the other hand, overclocking CPU-NB greatly benefited less-threaded applications, namely games. This can also be observed from the X264 HD 3.0 test, where the less intense first pass yields much better scaling with CPU-NB overclocking than the second pass.
We have no conclusive theory to explain this phenomenon at this time. Originally our suspicion was limited to CPU-NB’s frequencies and memory frequencies/timings, but now we wonder whether the size of L3, which is meager 1MB per core for the X6’s, comes into play as well. We are looking to further examine this subject in the future.
At the end of the journey, we do not have a show-stopper complaint on ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4. It does what it sets out to do and it does it very well. Is it worth $180 when ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 is $30 less? We think the difference largely comes down to the board’s selection of components. The Deluxe 4 is based on the 890FX chipset, more expensive than the 890GX. It has two NEC USB 3.0 controllers, instead of one, of which the performance is flawless. The bundled USB 3.0 front-panel bay unit is the first of the kind we have seen, and we suppose that costs something as well. Add them up, and you can imagine where the price difference lies. The M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 feels like a sprinter. The 890FX Deluxe 4 an all-round workhorse. And the choice is yours.
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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.