|
|
AMD 790FX Mobo Shootout
[Abstract]
The Spider AM3 Makeover Launched initially along with the original AMD Phenom as part of the Spider platform, AMD's enthusiast chipset, the 790FX remains the only one capable of supporting quad...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Overclocking
While the latest Phenom II X3 720 'Black Edition' has been heralded by many as the best overclocking Phenom II processor currently, our test system was using a Phenom II X4 810 instead. However, this shouldn't matter because when it comes to assessing our motherboards, we're more concerned about the upper limits of the FSB, which starts at 200MHz for these boards. Hence, we'll be lowering multipliers and ratios to ensure that the CPU, HyperTransport bus and memory are not the bottlenecks during our overclocking tests.
All three boards are able to support higher speed DDR3 memory than the official DDR3-1333. Of course, none of that came into play since we kept our memory ratios to the minimum. We have also included some of the relevant BIOS settings for the three boards, which you can see below, are actually very similar.
Overclocking Settings and Results
| O/CSettings | ASUSM4A79T Deluxe | GigabyteGA-MA790FXT-UD5P | MSI790FX-GD70 | | BaseClock | 200 -600 | 200 -500 | 200 -600 | | CPU Ratio | 8 - 13 | 5 - 13 | 4 -13 | | PCIeFrequency | 100 -150 | 100 -200 | 100 -200 | | MemoryRatio/Multiplier | Auto,800, 1066, 1333, 1600 | Auto,800, 1066, 1333, 1600 | Auto,1:2, 1:2.66, 1:3.33, 1:4 | | VoltageAdjustment | - CPU Voltage: 0.800 to 1.475V (0.0125V steps)
- DRAM Voltage: 1.5 to 2.5V (0.02V steps)
- NB Voltage: 1.10 to 1.40V (0.02V steps)
- HT Voltage: 1.20 to 1.50V (0.02V steps)
- SB Voltage: 1.20 to 1.35V (0.015V steps)
| - CPU Voltage: -0.60 to +0.60
- DRAM Voltage: +0.05 to +0.750V (0.02V steps)
- SB/HT Voltage: Normal, +0.1, +0.2, +0.3V
- NB Voltage: Normal, +0.1, +0.2, +0.3V
| - CPU Voltage: 0.98 to 1.93V (0.01V steps)
- Memory Voltage: 1.19 to 2.40V (0.01V steps)
- NB Voltage: 0.75 to 1.83V (0.01V steps)
- SB Voltage: 0.85 to 1.83 (0.01V steps)
- CPU-NB Voltage: 0.88 to 1.83V (0.01V steps)
| | MaximumOC (FSB) | 325MHz | 320MHz | 320MHz(313MHz with Auto O.C) |
The resultant FSB overclocks achieved for the three boards turned out to be similar, with the boards failing to boot into Windows at around the 320MHz mark. The useful Auto overclocking utility on the MSI came close to that maximum with its 313MHz result.
Test Setup
Since our main objective is to find out the best AMD 790FX from the three contenders, we will only be comparing them among themselves, as our previous testing of the chipset was done on a different test bed and hence not directly comparable. The following configuration was used:-
- AMD Phenom II X4 810 (2.6GHz)
- 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 7-7-20 CAS 7.0
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
- ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB - with ForceWare 178.24 drivers
- AMD SouthBridge Driver 8.522
- Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)
The following benchmarks were used to determine the performance of the AMD 790FX motherboards:-
BAPco SYSmark 2007 (with Patch 4)
Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
SPECviewperf 9.0
AquaMark3
|
|
|
