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
After two weeks of being abused, ASRock’s 890FX Deluxe 4 proved to be a worthy contender in the market where users are looking for a home of their brand new Thuban CPU. It wasn’t without its share of issues, though, and we want to disclose at this point that we lost our first deluxe 4 during testing. According to ASRock the board was a pre-retail board and we saw a few physical differences between the first and second board, so we do believe it.
When we compared ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4 and ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 through our benchmark suit, there was an interesting pattern. In applications that can take advantage of all 6 cores, the 890FX Deluxe 4 equaled, if not exceled by a thin hair, the M4A89GTD Pro/USB3. When not all CPU cores were busy, however, the M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 consistently pulled out better scores. The difference is small, but it is there nonetheless. We suspect that ASUS’ expertise in BIOS tuning is at work here, either for faster memory access or better Turbo Core implementation.
What we did not expect was that a similar pattern would emerge from our CPU-NB testing. Our experiment with Thuban’s CPU-NB was truly strange. In applications that can take advantage of as many cores as 6, the gains achieved by CPU-NB overclocking was rather small. It’s there, but not to the point of writing home about. On the other hand, overclocking CPU-NB greatly benefited less-threaded applications, namely games. This can also be observed from the X264 HD 3.0 test, where the less intense first pass yields much better scaling with CPU-NB overclocking than the second pass.
We have no conclusive theory to explain this phenomenon at this time. Originally our suspicion was limited to CPU-NB’s frequencies and memory frequencies/timings, but now we wonder whether the size of L3, which is meager 1MB per core for the X6’s, comes into play as well. We are looking to further examine this subject in the future.
At the end of the journey, we do not have a show-stopper complaint on ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4. It does what it sets out to do and it does it very well. Is it worth $180 when ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 is $30 less? We think the difference largely comes down to the board’s selection of components. The Deluxe 4 is based on the 890FX chipset, more expensive than the 890GX. It has two NEC USB 3.0 controllers, instead of one, of which the performance is flawless. The bundled USB 3.0 front-panel bay unit is the first of the kind we have seen, and we suppose that costs something as well. Add them up, and you can imagine where the price difference lies. The M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 feels like a sprinter. The 890FX Deluxe 4 an all-round workhorse. And the choice is yours.
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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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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!