ASRock 890FX Deluxe: Comprehensive Motherboard Review & Investigation of Thuban Performance Scaling

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.