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.
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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.
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Zap - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
How is the RMA process for ASRock, anyways? ASRock's site says to obtain RMA through your vendor, but what if the vendor has only a 30 day policy (like Newegg)?Nimiz99 - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
Great review and I loved your OC push on this board. Thank you.I was hoping to see a graph that shows 5 MoBo's (the top 2 or 3 with 1 or 2 boards in the same market segment as the one being reviewed) and what OC they achieved on the same D0 stepping chip that you have to see which MoBo performs best for the $ or in absolute. I know on a previous review for one of the Elite boards (300 to 500 dollar category) y'all actually compared the OC of three boards. To see that comparison is quite refreshing and putting in graphical form would be a welcome addition to an other-wise superb review.
I could envision the graph (or table for compactness) as such:
MoBo | Price (Bar with possible Label)
Name1 |$325 ----- 4.21 GHz
Name2 |$175 ---- 4.15 GHz
Name3 |$225 --- 4.12 GHz
ThisBoard|$190 ---4.10 GHz
SameMrkt |$180 -- 3.95 GHz
thanks - great review
jonup - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
I like your thinking!WRI - Sunday, June 6, 2010 - link
Active fan on the board is trash. Those cheeseball threepenny fans make noise, collect dust and quit before any other component. Start a collection of replacements to add to your junk drawer.howmoney - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
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