ASUS F2A85-V Pro Review: A Look at FM2 with A85X
by Ian Cutress on October 10, 2012 11:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Asus
- Trinity
- FM2
- A85X
ASUS F2A85-V Pro In The Box
What we get in the box usually is the cream of the package - something that little bit extra that makes the whole product a more enjoyable experience. Despite this, the price of the board usually indicates what level of goodies we get in the box, even if we have had a few surprises in the past. With this product selling for $140 at launch, more expensive than the high end Trinity processors, we should feel that there's something in the box to make it worth while. What we actually get in the box is:
Driver CD
IO Shield
User Manual
Four SATA Cables
Q-Connectors
The box could be a little more filled with joy - either a USB 3.0 panel or something similar. As mentioned before, I would have liked to see the ASUS WiFi/Bluetooth module on the 'Pro' board, which would have included antenna and the module in the box.
Voltage Readings
[retracted]
Unfortunately we are unable to bring you the results of our OCCT test, due to a level of incompatibility between OCCT and current FM2 boards we have discovered that was not correctly reading the voltage. This test in the future will require an OCCT update.
ASUS F2A85-V Pro Overclocking
Experience with ASUS F2A85-V Pro
Overclocking on a new platform is always a little frustrating – even if the principles of overclocking have not changed, or the architecture has not changed, a manufacturer may slightly confuse with different names for voltages, and there is no experience guiding how these processors may interact under voltage.
As such we have to take a methodical view to overclocking. For almost all 24/7 CPU overclocks all we ever need to adjust is the CPU multiplier and the CPU voltage, so starting with the load multiplier and voltage that comes with the processors is never a bad thing. In the case of our test bed we had an A10-5800K which has a maximum turbo multiplier of 42x and a load voltage of around 1.40 volts according to OCCT. Using this information I performed overclock testing starting at an underclock of 35x and attempted to find the minimum voltage needed to be set in the BIOS to make this stable. The system was then raised slowly with the multiplier, each time finding the minimum voltage required to be stable.
The third option that an overclocker may play with is Load Line Calibration. This adjusts the voltage drop across the processor when under load (as causing the processor to do work causes a droop in the voltage reading) – a low LLC uses less energy overall in the system and is often dictated in part by the processor manufacturer. However a high LLC often has the benefit of making an overclock stable. In the case of ASUS motherboards we get a variety of options for LLC, but for the purposes of testing here it was left on automatic.
The experience of overclocking on the F2A85-V Pro was fairly standard for a top tier motherboard – we get two automatic overclock options in the OS in the form of ‘Fast’ and ‘Extreme’, as well as one in the BIOS and the TPU switch on board which both perform the ‘Fast’ overclock. Manual overclock involves either playing with the AI Suite software until the system is unstable, then making permanent adjustments in the BIOS as required. Without comparing against other motherboards yet I cannot say how well this board performs relative to others, but having the temperature reading issue does not help much.
Methodology:
Our standard overclocking methodology is as follows. We select the automatic overclock options and test for stability with PovRay and OCCT to simulate high-end workloads. These stability tests aim to catch any immediate causes for memory or CPU errors.
For manual overclocks, based on the information gathered from previous testing, starts off at a nominal voltage and CPU multiplier, and the multiplier is increased until the stability tests are failed. The CPU voltage is increased gradually until the stability tests are passed, and the process repeated until the motherboard reduces the multiplier automatically (due to safety protocol) or the CPU temperature reaches a stupidly high level (100ºC+).
Our test bed is not in a case, which should push overclocks higher with fresher (cooler) air. We are using a beQuiet Dark Pro CPU cooler with its stock fan. This is a high-end air cooler, designed to tackle up to 150W of CPU power without issue.
Automatic Overclock:
Using the AI Suite software, we navigated to the TurboV Evo Automatic Tuning menu. It offers two options – ‘Fast’ and ‘Extreme’. Here are our results with these options.
With the ‘Fast’ option, the system rebooted indicating the CPU had been boosted to 43x and 100 MHz (4300 MHz total), with the IGP also boosted to 950 MHz. This overclock passed both OCCT and PovRay.
With the ‘Extreme’ option the system rebooted and initialized stress testing with the processor. The software started adjusting the CPU multiplier in the OS, rebooted then adjusted the APU frequency. When all was said and done, the final result was a CPU overclock to 44x and 100 MHz (4400 MHz total), with the IGP also boosted to 1013 MHz. This overclock passed PovRay but led to CPU errors in OCCT.
Manual Overclock:
With the manual overclock we left LLC on automatic, started at a CPU voltage of 1.1 volts and multiplier of 35x. On a failed boot or unstable system, the voltage was raised by +0.025 and retested. If a settings passed both PovRay and OCCT then the multiplier was raised. To show the tests going into this, here is a direct screenshot from my results file:
The best way to represent these results is with the following graph:
At 4.5 GHz I was unwilling to go much further without any clear indication of the temperature of the processor. Every setting would give a max reading of ~62C. Judging by the results of overclockers online, these processors on air could potentially go up to 5.1 GHz with the correct settings or a better processor – I have seen 4.8 GHz on 1.50 volts stable enough to run simple benchmarks. Overclocking a processor is like opening a packet of chocolate chip cookies – some cookies have a lot of chocolate chips and some have none. You hope the cookie you get is full of chocolate chips. In this case, I may have one without any. If I took this result in isolation, I would say that AMD are really pushing these chips to the limit on clock speed – getting 300 MHz more than stock is not representative of recent processor releases.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
66 Comments
View All Comments
IanCutress - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
1) Interestingly enough it is not a reviewers job to debug. I do correlate my results to the manufacturers, but I test on the latest publicly available BIOS at the time of testing. If I sat around waiting for 'the next BIOS' then each review would take 3x as long and I couldn't feed my family. Sorry to disappoint. (Also, not all reviewers are masculine as per your pronoun usage.)2) The USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gbps are both native on Intel and AMD unless specified otherwise. I believe it is an appropriate comparison. People deciding to upgrade will want a comparison between what is available now in the market, not what was on the market. There is scope for editorials to look at how certain dynamics have changed over the years, but also tests change. My old data for 9xx chipsets is not relevant here.
3) Again, tests change over time in order to correlate with newer hardware and test the capabilities. If you have the spare time to dig out the hardware and run the newer tests, that's up to you. The other 14 motherboards I have in needed to be tested get priority here otherwise they become irrelevant. I would love to have infinite hardware and infinite time to do the comparisons, but that is not a logistical possibility.
4) Each chipset is tested against a single CPU. P67/Z68 was i5-2500K, X79 was i7-3960X, FM1 was A6-3650, FM2 was A10-5800K.
5) My apologies, next time I'll forgo the initial release review because it's the only board in my hand before release and wait a few months until I have six reviewed then post them at once when they become a little irrelevant.
6) Have you? Have you got time to do stability testing? What about testing it at high altitude, or in the Sahara?
If you believe there are things missing from the review, helpfully suggest additions for future consideration. My email is through my name on the review.
brookheather - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
Typo - "there is few reasons to jump on board to Trinity".Mugur - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Well, she was hot back in the first Matrix days... :-)silverblue - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
"With that being said, it is clear that video conversion is an INT process and all four of the A10-5800K INT units are being used"Are they, though? If so, it's a bit disappointing. Are all four threads maxed out in Task Manager? It'd be interesting to see a 4C/4T Intel processor thrown in there (2500K seems a perfect candidate) as well.
From looking at this, it should mean that an identically clocked Piledriver (83xx) CPU wouldn't be too far behind the 3770K in this one test. It does also mean, unfortunately, that even with linear performance scaling, even the top Piledriver CPU won't dethrone Thuban in the 3DPM MP test.
Soulnibbler - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
What does is this line in the performance section supposed to mean?QUOTE:
From a practical standpoint, the lack of floating point units in the CPU gives cause for concern as not everyone codes in hex or integer style (my own personal software all uses FP – INT would be confusing to code for me for negligible gain on most architectures).
/QUOTE:
I'm assuming you are referring to the bulldozer/steamroller architecture with a shared FPU unit per pair of integer units. On first reading it implies (and this implication is uncontested by the bizarre contents of of the following parentheses) that there is no floating point unit on the chip. That is patently wrong as there is a rather nice FPU shared between every two integer cores.
The other interpretation is that you think it needs MORE than half an FPU per core. That is an arguable point, but then the strange text in the parentheses paints you as someone who needs much more study towards what actually happens in a program. So much of your normal computing occurs in integer space. There isn't really any sort of program I can easily think of where you don't use integer operations (even memory mapping is integer) many times in order to prepare to do a single FP operation. The counter examples are all pretty much graphics examples where we want to work on vectors. The Trinity FPU has a nice vector processor too. If you break down and look at the machine code that any of your programs use you will find that an overwhelming (much greater than 66%) of that code is integer code.
Crying OH NOES 1/2 A FPU, is not good reporting. YES the AMD chips lag the Intel chips, YES the design parameters are different. The unfounded supposition that performance difference are due to that specific portion of the architectural choice is frankly bad journalism. If you want to make claims like that you have to point to a set of benchmarks that demonstrate clearly that the 1/2 FPUs are to blame. I doubt this is the case as most analysis that I've seen points to larger memory subsystem problems as a much bigger factor.
IanCutress - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
If your supposition is true, then the A10-5800K should not experienced as much of a decrease against the competition as it did do in the results.My 3DPM results clear my position on the matter:
"In the single threaded test, a lot of conclusions can be drawn from the comparison of AMD architectures. Direct comparison of Piledriver to Bulldozer (A10-5800K to FX-8150) gives a boost in single core performance of 7%, however comparing the old Stars cores of the A8-3850 at 2.9 GHz is roughly the same as the new Piledriver core at 4.2 GHz. So even with a 1.3 GHz advantage, Piledriver is only as good as Stars and less efficient in floating point results. If we compare Piledriver to Thuban, i.e. A10-5800K to X6 1100T, the Piledriver core gets stomped on by a good 25% performance. I find this quite staggering – most of the code I ever encountered as a computational chemist was floating point based, dealing with single and double precision on a regular basis. On this result, I would steer clear of Piledriver.
The multithreaded version of 3DPM is slightly tougher to analyze. Due to the FP nature of the program, the A10-5800K is essentially a 2 core FPU processor, whereas all the other comparative AMD processors have either 4 or 6 FPUs to play with. What is perhaps worth considering is that the Bulldozer processor with 4 modules scores 326.32, whereas the Piledriver processor with only 2 modules scores 203.06, which is more than half. This would mean that the Piledriver core actually achieves 20% better performance at the same frequency, despite our ST test giving Piledriver only a 7% increase. Part of this could be put down to the architecture improvements – improved scheduling for heavily threaded loads, one of the downfalls of Bulldozer but was improved in Piledriver could be the reason here."
My basis for my comments is from a computational complexity standpoint. Sure memory mapping may be an int process, but if I only do it at the beginning and end of a matrix transformation (and thereby having a total processing time less than 0.1% of the program) then it becomes insignificant.
What AMD have done is project that applications in the future which require heavy computational throughput will be driven by INT ops. The big software vendors can do this, making video conversion and ray tracing type applications enhanced by use of INT ops. But for the non-CompSci scientist who relies more on readable code but also wants a speed increase, then going all out on the INT side may not be possible, and we get limited performance due to the scheduling and the lack of pure grunt due to the gutted APU. It's a design choice AMD have to live with, and I'm not the only one who is not entirely in favor of it.
Scootiep7 - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
Ok, I'm trying not to break down and just buy a Llano for my HTPC build, but does anybody know how much longer it'll be till I can get some nice options for a mini-ITX such as http://news.softpedia.com/news/MSI-Presents-FM2-A7... and the 5700k? What's the holdup on these!groundhogdaze - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
AMD should play to their strengths which is an affordable CPU with a relatively fast integrated GPU. That means focusing a small form factor systems such as AIO, ITX, HTPC class systems, however, I am surprised and disappointed at the relative lack of options when it comes to ITX FMx motherboards. I sold my AMD stock when I concluded they had their strategy wrong. Most folks who want to use a full sized case would also want to use a dedicated GPU, otherwise, what's the point of having a full sized case? Wrong marketing choice.Unless AMD can improve their heat/power ratings, the Intel G530 makes better sense as a NAS solution as it is dirt cheap and uses less power than its advertised 65w TDP while running circles around the Atom class processors. I hope AMD is reading the forums and best luck to them.
Mugur - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
You are right. Full ATX and Trinity makes little sense. mATX and mini ITX with 8 SATA3 and integrated graphics should be the focus. Full ATX in fact makes little sense today, anyway... :-)If you want more than a NAS from a server, the best 65W Trinity part should be nice. I have a Phenom II X2 rated 80W in my HTPC and an Athlon II X4 (95W) in my server at home. Neither of them comes even closer to their rated TDP, according to the "green" ICs and software of the motherboards (Gigabyte and Asus).
silverblue - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
AMD seems to volt their processors conservatively, so K10Stat (or other utilities) or using the BIOS to reduce the voltage may prove useful in reducing power consumption noticably without affecting performance more than a couple of percent.Toms ran an article on this as regards Trinity, and have done so with various AMD models in the past:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-5800k-trin...
Saving 14W for a tiny performance deficit is more than acceptable in my eyes.
I undervolted my Phenom II X3 710 as per the following article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-powe...
(though I needed to raise voltages by 0.025v to keep it 100% stable in my case)