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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Antronman - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
It's Asus.Of course it's going to be recommended.
Every fool knows Asus is #1
yannigr - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
And those who are not fools? What do they think about ASUS? :PHanzNFranzen - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
lol!! =)Yorgos - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
I am really happy with asrock extreme6+, which packs more features+1 64 Mbit Flash ROM (awesome feature)
+1 HDMI (4 monitors in total)
-1 eSata (instead of 2 on the asus)
-2 usb2.0
+1 Sata
+ power and reset buttons (f* great feature)
+ doesn't make you look like a pimp with gold teeth
+Wake on LAN
+ cheaper for around 20 € in my country than the asus
In my opinion you CANNOT beat those feature with a better price and better benchmarks.
That's why I never read the conclusions, If I wanted an opinion I could ask also my dog, both of them have the same value.
Alexvrb - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
What about PWM (4-pin) fan headers? If I was in the market for this kind of board, this A88X Pro would be the one I'd get, just because of its abundance of 4-pin connectors (5 of them). Most ATX A88X boards have... 3? With maybe one or two 3-pins to go with them. Yeah, you can get splitters (better get well-made ones) but then you can only monitor the speed of one of the connected fans per motherboard header.Antronman - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
Yeah.And it's ASUS quality.
Alexvrb - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
Which, most of the time, means it's good. I've been burned over the years by most of the major manufacturers at least once, including Asus. Sometimes it's a hardware/design issue, sometimes it's software/firmware. On occasion it was a problem with the chipset itself, and not entirely the manufacturers fault. About the most solid boards I used were by Epox, hilariously enough.But yes, overall I'd consider Asus to generally produce good boards, particularly if you're buying one of their "premium" models.
tuklap - Friday, April 25, 2014 - link
I just hope Asrock placed anti surge ic's and esd protections :(just4U - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
In my opinion none of this matters until they finally release the A8- 7X series processors. Don't know about the rest of you but I've been eyeing it for multiple builds simply because of it's price/performance ratio. I'd expected it to be release already.HiTechObsessed - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
My problem with these APUs is something like the A10-7850k costs $180, or you can get the 750k for $80, and a 7770 GHz for $100 and blow the 7850k out of the water in performance. APUs don't make sense on large boards like this when you can pair the same CPU up with a dedicated GPU and get much more gaming power.