Test Setup & Test Methodology Having compared the 790FX with 890GX and FX, I was keen to see how the little nephews would perform. Testing platform is based on AMD's 965BE CPU and 4GB of Corsair PC12800C8 RAM. For the GPU power I'm counting either on the integrated solution or on a Nvidia GTX 285 card.
Here's the rundown on the sytem specs and speeds tested :
The AMD 965 BE CPU was run at stock speeds : 3400Mhz with 2000Mhz NB speeds.
Operating system is Windows 7 Professional 64bit, Videocard driver for the GTX 285 is the WHQL 179.45 64bit version
Benchmark Results
SuperPi 1m en Wprime32 as always counting on raw CPU power. We are seeing that the AMD chipsets with the integrated GPUs are a fraction slower than the other ones.
Seems more like the results of world final 100 meter sprint. Differences have to found in hundreds of a second. This all seems negligible at first. But let's take a look at the more stressful Pi32mb and Wprime 1024. Can the little mATX still keep up with bigger sized boards ?
The 870A powered UD3 surpasses both GX chipsets and stays well in touch with the FX flagships. Both the 880GMA and 890GX have to throw the towel into the ring. Over 20 seconds slower in Superpi 32mb is again a clear indication these chipsets are dialed in with far looser timings. In defense of the 880GMA-UD2H we had 512Mb of ram shared for the GPU. The Asrock 890GX has got its own dedicated GPU memory aka Sideport ram. The former allows the Operating system to have full access to the installed 4gb of ram.
3Dmark 01, even though it's an aging benchmark, still gives a good idea of how the subsystem is performing. If you have good overall bandwidth this benchmark will get a nice boost.
First let's compare the Integrated Video solutions (ATI 4250 vs 4290 on the ASrock board). The ATI 4250, without Sideport ram, is like bringing the lamb to the slaughter. The Unified Memory Architecture ( UMA) is far slower than the Sideport memory of the 890GX. But the mATX 880GMA is more HTPC multimedia orientated, so the lower 3Dmark scores are not of that big importance.
Equipping all motherboards with the Nvidia GTX 285 we see that the FX chipsets are supreme clock for clock. The 870 is keeping in touch, but never rivals the more expensive boards. How does this reflect in games ? Maybe 1-3 FPS difference, that's all there's to it folks... some things are really overrated.
Cinebench release 10, hammers on your CPU cores hard. Single threaded, all boards are pretty competitive. Yet when allowing the benchmark to utilize all the available cores, it is all clear again. Boards with the onboard GPU's just can't keep up. The 870 keeps the FX boards in sight, but will have to settle again with a 3rd spot.
Maybe due to sharing 512 MB of memory, the little mATX UD2 is the slowest 850 SB powered board of the pack. But it's no slouch and still manages to pull of some nice scores. The 870 UD3 is a tad more efficient and again stays in touch with the 890FX chipset.
Last test in the suite is the encoding of a HD video via X264HD. The performance of the 880GMA-UD2H is on par with ASrocks' 890GX motherboard. Not bad at all for a HTPC based motherboard. The UD3 again faces the big boys and does deliver. Amazing value for the buck!
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