ASUS A88X-Pro Review: Kaveri, Kaveri, Quite Contrary
by Ian Cutress on April 22, 2014 11:59 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- AMD
- Asus
- Kaveri
Sleeping Dogs
Sleeping Dogs is a benchmarking wet dream – a highly complex benchmark that can bring the toughest setup and high resolutions down into single figures. Having an extreme SSAO setting can do that, but at the right settings Sleeping Dogs is highly playable and enjoyable. We run the basic benchmark program laid out in the Adrenaline benchmark tool, and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
| Sleeping Dogs, 1080p Max | ||
| NVIDIA | AMD | |
| Average Frame Rates |
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| Minimum Frame Rates |
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Company of Heroes 2
Company of Heroes 2 also can bring a top end GPU to its knees, even at very basic benchmark settings. To get an average 30 FPS using a normal GPU is a challenge, let alone a minimum frame rate of 30 FPS. For this benchmark I use modified versions of Ryan’s batch files at 1920x1080 on Medium. COH2 is a little odd in that it does not scale with more GPUs with the drivers we use.
| Company of Heroes 2, 1080p Max | ||
| NVIDIA | AMD | |
| Average Frame Rates |
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| Minimum Frame Rates |
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Battlefield 4
The EA/DICE series that has taken countless hours of my life away is back for another iteration, using the Frostbite 3 engine. AMD is also piling its resources into BF4 with the new Mantle API for developers, designed to cut the time required for the CPU to dispatch commands to the graphical sub-system. For our test we use the in-game benchmarking tools and record the frame time for the first ~70 seconds of the Tashgar single player mission, which is an on-rails generation of and rendering of objects and textures. We test at 1920x1080 at Ultra settings.
| Battlefield 4, 1080p Max | ||
| NVIDIA | AMD | |
| Average Frame Rates |
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| 99th Percentile Frame Rates |
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mikato - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
"ASUS has suggested that my review CPU from AMD is from an initial batch of A10-7850K which may have higher-than-retail leakage issues. We are currently investigating this further.""Signs may point towards early batch of Kaveri processors that draw higher current, or the silicon lottery."
Wow, does this mean you are going to rerun the power consumption numbers from the Kaveri review and give us new graphs? You really should.
"we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio"
I'm just curious how that's possible? Do you use blank bars on the sides? Or do they all have the same length:width ratio to match 640x480 to begin with?
Hrel - Thursday, April 24, 2014 - link
"A side note: we are looking into the restarting flaw that seems to occur during our specialised benchmark under high CPU load. Signs may point towards early batch of Kaveri processors that draw higher current, or the silicon lottery. We need to get a newer one in to retest our Photoscan benchmark."The fact that you still recommended this motherboard, despite the above quote, makes this sites recommendations meaningless. You're AMD bias is only going to do harm, not good. Please stop yourselves from showing such obvious favoritism. AMD platforms are less stable than Intel, this is a long known fact.
silverblue - Sunday, April 27, 2014 - link
And this is the sort of FUD that AMD and its customers have to put up with.Haravikk - Sunday, April 27, 2014 - link
It's nice to see AMD still getting some good performance motherboards. This said, I have to say I really prefer the layout of the ASRock FM2A88-ITX+ motherboard, and wish more motherboards would do something similar. While it does get a little tight on the CPU cooler to have the memory angled "horizontally" towards the "top" of the motherboard, it just gives much better airflow and cooler RAM in general; I wish more manufacturers would do this, and just leave cooler manufacturers to adapt.