ASRock X58 Extreme3: An Enthusiast X58 Motherboard at a Budget Price?
by Ian Cutress on June 2, 2010 4:10 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- ASRock
- X58
Far Cry 2
Featuring fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine, this game also features one of the most impressive benchmark tools we have seen in a PC game. The built in benchmark tool runs a preset sequence of ingame action, to model real world gameplay. The tool runs the benchmark three times by default, to which the fps values are averaged for our results.
>
We can see a clear loss here for the Extreme3 in both single and dual GPU setups. The overclock benefited the dual GPU setup a lot more than the single GPU setup, showing that CPU data transfer and processing eventually becomes a bottleneck in good configurations for Far Cry 2.
Unigine Heaven
Unigine Heaven is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark Unigine Corp, supporting DirectX 9, 10 and 11, OpenGL 4.0, tesselation and SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion). The benchmark is an efficient test of DirectX 11 techniques across 24 different visual scenarios. The benchmark outputs an average and minimum fps score, however we cannot reliably look at minimum fps, as on rare occasions it would dip to around 5fps for a single frame which was not repeatable.
There is very little difference between both motherboards, although the Extreme3 does consistently score lower.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
35 Comments
View All Comments
DJMiggy - Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - link
Thanks Ian. This is great!nvalhalla - Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - link
(It might have been covered in the article, I didn't see it though. If so I apologize and feel free to yell at me.)How many PCI-E lanes have been dedicated to the USB3 and SATA6 ports? If I'm buying this over another X58 board because of those 2 options, it's important to know whether they are running at the proper speed.
IanCutress - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
We have got confirmation from ASRock, and they both use one lane each.All the best,
Ian
jyqureshi - Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - link
When is Anandtech going to review Xeon server boards like this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...And it's not a matter of why I would need one, it's a matter of why not?
Anyway...it would be great to see a comparison of the popular server boards that can be used in a desktop configuration.
ekv - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
Actually, the TYAN S7025WAGM2NR is a pretty decent board. Xeon 5500 series processors are reasonably priced. I would like to perform some comparisons tween this board and a couple Enthusiast boards. Very curious about price / perf. Gaming, general purpose AND server type workloads...AdamK47 - Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - link
I don't understand why some motherboard makers put the PCI-E 1X slot below the primary PCI-E 16X slot. Put it above the 16X slot!jonp - Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - link
What does "above" and "below" mean?FormulaRedline - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
Essentially below means the 1X slot is blocked by a dual slot graphics card while above means the 1x can still be used.FormulaRedline - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
Just to add: it is a bit strange as the predecessor, the ASRock X58 Extreme, does have a x1 slot on top. However, it just seems to be plain missing on this board (notice only 6 slots). Maybe to deal with the extra requirements of the USB 3.0 and SATA 6?Fortunately, any x1 card can also be used in the x16/x8 slots.
lopri - Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - link
Very detailed and user-friendly review, thank you very much. I'd like a little more commet on the auxiliary fan, though. (The one for CPU power circuitry) If you could measure the temperature difference between on and off, as well as other vendors' passive designs.