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 - 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.