ASRock FM2A88X Extreme6+ Review
by Ian Cutress on March 19, 2014 11:59 AM ESTF1 2013
First up is F1 2013 by Codemasters. I am a big Formula 1 fan in my spare time, and nothing makes me happier than carving up the field in a Caterham, waving to the Red Bulls as I drive by (because I play on easy and take shortcuts). F1 2013 uses the EGO Engine, and like other Codemasters games ends up being very playable on old hardware quite easily. In order to beef up the benchmark a bit, we devised the following scenario for the benchmark mode: one lap of Spa-Francorchamps in the heavy wet, the benchmark follows Jenson Button in the McLaren who starts on the grid in 22nd place, with the field made up of 11 Williams cars, 5 Marussia and 5 Caterham in that order. This puts emphasis on the CPU to handle the AI in the wet, and allows for a good amount of overtaking during the automated benchmark. We test at 1920x1080 on Ultra graphical settings for a single GPU, as using multiple GPUs seems to have no scaling effect.
| F1 2013, 1080p Max | ||
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Compared to the Intel platforms we have so far put through our 2014 gaming tests, the A10-7850K gives reasonable 60+ FPS numbers for single GPU F1 2013, but the high end Intel parts can offer almost a +50% gain. Adding more GPUs just compounds the issue. We are testing other FM2+ motherboards to see if this range of results is consistent.
Bioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite was Zero Punctuation’s Game of the Year for 2013, uses the Unreal Engine 3, and is designed to scale with both cores and graphical prowess. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
| Bioshock Infinite, 1080p Max | ||
| NVIDIA | AMD | |
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With Bioshock Infinite the difference is not as much as it was in F1 2013, however beyond a single GPU there is a deficit.
Tomb Raider
The next benchmark in our test is Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider is an AMD optimized game, lauded for its use of TressFX creating dynamic hair to increase the immersion in game. Tomb Raider uses a modified version of the Crystal Engine, and enjoys raw horsepower. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
| Tomb Raider, 1080p Max | ||
| NVIDIA | AMD | |
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Tomb Raider does great with AMD, with this game essentially being CPU agnostic.
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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
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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.