ASRock FM2A88X Extreme6+ Review
by Ian Cutress on March 19, 2014 11:59 AM ESTASRock FM2A88X Extreme6+ Conclusion
Motherboards bearing the FM2+ name fall into two categories – those released before the Kaveri launch in January and those released alongside or after. For the first category, certain assumptions about the state of the final Kaveri silicon had to be made, and the motherboards built around those assumptions. Because of the processing node difference between Richland and Kaveri and the differing voltage characteristics of the two processors therein, it was important to ‘over-engineer’ a motherboard to consider the potential consequences a hungry Kaveri could have made.
A similar comparison could be drawn with 990FX motherboards, first taking Zosma/Thuban K10 style cores and then moving onto the Bulldozer/Piledriver combination that exists. Some 990FX motherboards built could not seem to handle the stress of the new architecture.
The ASRock FM2A88X Extreme6+ is not that problematic – it will run both Richland and Kaveri without skipping a beat, as long as sufficient provisions are made to the power delivery cooling especially if the system is overclocked. It seems rough that the system would provide very high temperatures at stock (or stock + 20 minutes of intense CPU usage), but that is the unfortunate reality of the situation of our review. Ultimately this leads to the recommendation that users update the BIOS before they start installing an operating system, which in our testing led to a better temperature gradient after heavy CPU loading.
Temperature issues aside, the Extreme6+ sits at the top end of ASRock’s FM2 stack, with the Realtek ALC1150 audio codec, additional USB 3.0 ports and the BIOS/software platform being worthy of note. In performance terms ASRock trades blows with another motherboard we have on our test bed but not yet reviewed, although we will have to test a number of other FM2+ motherboards to see where it stacks up against the competition. Having a POST time lower than 10 seconds is a plus, although the lack of extras in the box for a high end FM2+ motherboard might be cause for concern. For legacy users who want to dabble with HSA, lots of memory, PCI and a COM port, ASRock has you covered with the FM2A88X Extreme6+.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
44 Comments
View All Comments
5thaccount - Thursday, March 20, 2014 - link
I know this isn't a review of the APU, but I'm very curious why it wasn't benched against a Celeron / i3 / i5 in the system and game benchmarks. I wouldn't expect this to come near i7 / Xeon territory (although, to it's credit, it did better than I was expecting). Was it only to strictly compare relative performance to the fastest Intel can provide? I'd be curious to see how it fared against similarly priced and cheaper Intel CPUs - especially in the game benchmarks.aike - Friday, March 21, 2014 - link
All the shock practice on the devices can be used keep on effort just by advantage about keeping effort or possibly at home process. All the devices undeniably construct over to any <a href="http://www.katalog.cc/">rolex replica</a> private??? lenses temperament, considering that it adds something to a?? lenses is visually and additionally trend.aike - Friday, March 21, 2014 - link
Genuinely, each one of on top of exploit fundamental purpose typically the copy wholesale handbags turned out to be some type of shrewd undermine concerning trendy finishing touches an increasing number of gals get to approve perhaps even booty.http://www.oakleafgardenmachinery.co.uk/superrepli...DrMrLordX - Saturday, March 22, 2014 - link
Thank you for taking the time to review this board, Mr. Cutress. I am curious about CPU throttling under heavy IGP load. Did you experience this problem? Some have attributed this to VRM temperatures, but others have observed that this may be related to a design decision on AMD's part to keep total power delivery to the chip within a specific TDP envelope, even when overclocking is present.I have been trying to figure out which AM2+ boards can mitigate or defeat this throttling behavior through UEFI settings. There is another way not involving the UEFI:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1459225/i-have-custom-l...
but it would be much nicer to tweak the UEFI to defeat this p5 state behavior. People with "good" cooling on the CPU and VRMs are still getting throttling, at least on some boards, some of the time . . . it's hard to nail down exactly who has this problem.