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
Timed with Phenom II X6 CPU launch, AMD introduced a new platform to go along and dubbed it “Leo”. Essentially, the Leo platform is comprised of the the following: Phenom II CPU, 890GX/890FX motherboard, and Radeon HD 5800 series video card. Instead of the obvious marketing, we are focusing on what has changed on the 890FX from the 790FX. The improvements are rather sparse, but there still are meaningful improvements on Leo platform over previous generation platforms and we covered some of those in the past.
While the changes are subtle, they are just about enough to make the 890FX the most advanced desktop chipset today. The most significant contributions lie in the amount of PCI Express 2.0 at its disposal as well as the official support of SATA 6.0 Gbps standard. Not only does it provide the most PCIe bandwidth, but from what we’ve seen most board makers opt to utilize the PCIe 2.0 lanes stemming from the north bridge for the boards’ PCIe slots and peripheral controllers unlike Intel’s PCH-based solutions that rely on PCIe 1.0 bandwidth then have to go through slow DMI bus. On ASRock’s 890FX Deluxe 4 we had no problem fully saturating the total available 42 lanes.
However one thing we find somewhat dubious is AMD’s claim of 5.2 GT/s of HyperTransport bandwidth. The HyperTransport bandwidth is closely related to the CPU-NB (CPU’s Integrated memory controller) frequency as we will see later, and in order for HyperTransport bus to supply 5.2 GT/s of bandwidth the CPU-NB should be running at 2.6 GHz or faster. We do not know of a shipping AMD CPU with its CPU-NB at 2.6 GHz, so that kind of makes the 5.2 GT/s claim meaningless. To be fair, the claim is on the chipset not on the CPUs, and we did not have trouble running ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4 @2.6 GHz HT Link frequency along with our retail 1090T’s CPU-NB @2.6 GHz.
The interconnect between north bridge and south bridge, A-Link, has been upgraded to PCIe 2.0 standard from PCIe 1.1 on 790FX/SB750 combo. The new south bridge, SB850, is indeed what steals the spotlight, providing six native SATA 6.0 Gbps ports and whooping 14 USB ports. It also retains its RAID capability from its predecessor, but we advise against complex RAID setups like RAID5 or RAID10 on chipset-based controllers. AHCI standard received an upgrade as well, from V1.1 to V1.2.
IOMMU is an acronym of Input-Output Memory Management Unit, and it is supposed to make virtualizing I/O such as the storage subsystem or video cards possible. Even though virtualization is gaining traction on desktops thanks in part to Windows 7’s XP Mode, desktop virtualization is still limited on CPU virtualization. We are still some time away from I/O virtualization on desktops, and in any case we’re not aware of any client Windows OS that support I/O virtualization. So this remains a check-box feature for now.
We are unsure as to why TDPs have increased for both 890FX and SB850, but without AMD disclosing datasheets for those we are left, well, unsure. We assume they did go up considering that AMD heavily touted 10W TDP for 790FX at its launch. This time AMD is rather silent on the TDP front. Lastly, we see AMD’s first gigabit controller native to SB850, but we haven’t seen any board that uses it.
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Kane Y. Jeong - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
We disabled Turbo Core for maximum overclocking. vCore was measured by a DMM.softdrinkviking - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
nice review, good read.one thing I noticed, in your chart comparing the 890FX and 790FX, it says "TMSC 65nm," i am thinking that should be "TMSC 45nm."
or maybe i'm crazy, or maybe both are true?
softdrinkviking - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
or is that the AMD890 chipset manufacturing process that's at 65nm?pkc - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
I believe that it should be compared with ASUS M4A89TD Pro/USB3 and Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5 which are using the same chipset i.e. 890FXMacLeod1592 - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
I currently run an ASRock 780G motherboard and was hoping theyd stepped it up a notch. My board also overvolts the CPU when I overclock. Its always a notch or two higher in CPU-Z than what I set it to in the BIOS.Mines also not a great overclocker. I cant get my Athlon X3 435 over 3.4 but all the reviews Im seeing have it at 3.6 and better!
Looks like Asus will be getting my money in the near future when I upgrade mobos.
siniranji - Thursday, September 2, 2010 - link
my question is , which thuban processor will perform well with this board, i have 1055T modelMrSpadge - Saturday, September 4, 2010 - link
Can I comment now?MrSpadge - Saturday, September 4, 2010 - link
Ups, that was unexpected. On to my actual comment regarding:"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."
Naturally modern games have very complex scenes so the CPU has to deal with a lot of data. Which data is not entirely predictable & prefetchable, so the CPU absolutely needs large caches. In fact, the caches can hardly be large enough - so main memory bandwidth and latency matters.
The encoding on all 6 cores on the other hand is a very regular task and the memory requests are quite predictable. The programmer or and / the cpu prefetchers are working to keep all the data in the caches before they are needed.
Or put empirically: If the app is programmed so well that it scales well from 4 to 6 cores [your encoding does], memory access can not be a problem here. And thus faster memory doesn't help much.
Regards, MrS
geok1ng - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
There we have it again, a seminal article that will be quoted around the web for months to come.This easy to read article is the most complete and compreensive guide to AM3 plataform overcloking, and deserves to join the now famous "why we were wrong about the P45 chipset" article on C2D memory overcloking and the SSDs series.
To give you guys an example of the importance of NB overcloking on these AMDs hexacores, Tom Hardware´s has an article on the system builders marathon today that shows a 1055T system with SLI 480s. Th build fails to impress by about 20% agains a similar priced $2000 Intel system, and guess what? TH makes no mention of NB overclock!
RealTheXev - Friday, September 10, 2010 - link
I've run into several people who have had a 8xx series AMD chipset but have run into an issue of having an SB750 southbridge instead of the SB850.http://www.starcraft2forum.org/forums/showthread.p... for my write up.
My question is, will Asus be addressing this issue by adding the SB750 to their chipset drivers? Also, will this board possible be substituted for an SB750 southbridge as well? If so, I want to know the performance difference!
Asus isn't the only manufacture substituting the southbridge. I'm curious about the difference between the SB850 and SB750 variants of these boards and how likely it is a user will end up with one of these boards "substituted" boards.