ASRock 890FX Deluxe: Comprehensive Motherboard Review & Investigation of Thuban Performance Scaling
by Rajinder Gill on August 31, 2010 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- ASRock
- AMD
- Motherboards
- 890FX
We now follow up with our usual system evaluation suit to test ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4 and pit it against ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 . For this part of the test, we enabled all the power-saving features of our 1090T and Turbo Core, and Windows power plan was set to “Balanced”. We matched the 4x2GB of Corsair XMS3 sticks to DDR3-1600/7-8-7-1T on both boards using 3:12 (1:4) divider. All games were tested at their maximum graphics quality settings available in-game. Anti-aliasing was set to 4xAA when applicable, and anisotropic filtering was set to 16xAF in Catalyst Control Panel.
Application Performance - WinRAR 3.90 64-bit
This benchmark compresses our AT workload consisting of a main folder that contains 954MB of files in 15 subfolders. The result is a file approximately 829MB in size.
Application Performance - Bibble 5.0
We utilize Bibble Labs’ Bibble 5 v2 to convert 50 RAW image files into full size JPEG images with the program’s default settings. This program is fully multithreaded and multi-core aware.
Application Performance - Sorenson Squeeze 6.0
We are using Sorenson Squeeze to convert eight AVCHD videos into HD Flash videos for use on websites. This application heavily favors physical core count and processor clock speed.
Gaming Performance - Resident Evil 5
We are using the built-in benchmark utility of Capcom's highly addictive horror game.
Gaming Performance - StarCraft 2
We use the same replay file we used in part 1, but the numbers are slightly different because here our setups are devised more closely to match actual user experience. Keep in mind that Turbo Core is enabled and memory configuration is different for this part of the test. 16AF is forced from Catalyst Control Center.
USB 3.0 Performance
We use Acronis TrueImage Home (v. 10) to make a backup of our installation drive to an external SATA 3.0 Gbps drive via USB 3.0 and compare it with USB 2.0 and SATA 3.0 Gbps transfers. The total data backed up is approximately 20 GB. We could not complete the backup on the M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 in a consistent manner.
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jonup - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Very impressed to see this approach to your testing. I hete when reading an MB reveiw and reach the benchmark section. Same chipsets tend to perform the same. A guess this would be an one-off since in the next review it will be redundant.vol7ron - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
agreed, nice review.Finally - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I must say that this review was nice to have, I'm much more interested in the 870 Chipset.It's almost identical, except the support of Crossfire, which I have no use for.
RequiemsAllure - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
ahh, but on the ASRock 870 extreme 3 Crossfire is supported.SpaceRanger - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
In the article:USB 3.0 Performance
We use Acronis TrueImage Home (v. 10) to make a backup of our installation drive to an external SATA 3.0 Gbps drive via USB 3.0 and compare it with USB 2.0 and SATA 3.0 Gbps transfers. The total data backed up is approximately 20 GB. We could not complete the backup on the 890GTD Pro/USB3 in a consistent manner.
My Question:
Why were you not able to complete the backup on the 890GTD Pro/USB3? At the conclusion you state :
Is it worth $180 when ASUS 890GTD Pro/USB3 is $30 less? We think the difference largely comes down to the board’s selection of components.
I would call not being able to do a simple backup with the 890GTD enough of a showstopper to not even consider the board. Am I missing something here?
semo - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I'm also wondering about the SATA3 performance. An issue was identified here on AT with the new 8xx chipset earlier which slowed down SSDs considerably compared to ICH10 controllers. Has this been fixed yet?Kane Y. Jeong - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Hi,Please check Raja's ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 review here.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2959
We purchased another retail M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 off the shelf, and still ran into inconsistent USB 3.0 performance. Sometimes the drives lost connections, and Acronis reported error in the middle of backup process. Success ratio to complete the backup was about 30~40%. An alternative would be to purchase M4A89GTD Pro (not Pro/USB3) for $10 less and go with an add-in card. We did not experience this issue on ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4.
SpaceRanger - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Thank you for the response. So you're advising getting the Pro (not Pro/USB3) instead of the 890FX? Cause Raja's findings would be enough for me to not want to get it.nbjknk - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
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Thursday, 21 October 2010 at 9:48 PM
optarix12 - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
This is a very nice writeup and relevant to my interests to boot. Thank you for the concise article Kane. Oh, and if you ever figure out why you saw the inexplicable results you should do a part 2!