As you saw with our recent coverage of the Gigabyte Open Overclocking Competition (GOOC) North American Finals Gigabyte is pushing their way back into the fore front of the enthusiast scene. It was not that long ago when their mindset seemed to be one of just maintaining the status quo and building boards for the average consumer. But something changed their minds and they decided to refocus on the enthusiast and the upper end of the consumer market (the upper-mid-range?) We began to see Gigabyte (or GB for short) drop things in like 2 ounces of copper into each board. They shifted away from standard capacitors and move to all solid caps. They beefed up their power phases and even added in a hardware/software phase switching capability for better energy efficiency. GB seems to be willing and able to push the envelope of the enthusiast’s needs and even some of their crazed wants with their newest additions to the Ultra Durable line up. They have shown us great promise with their Intel based boards, so how about something from AMD? Not that long ago we took a look at the 890FXA-UD7 with AMD’s flagship CPU the Phenom II X6 1090T just to see if Gigabyte can maintain the same performance levels with AMD as they have shown with Intel’s CPUs.
PCMark Vantage -PCMark Vantage is a suite of tests designed to test the power of your computer. It runs task that range from productivity to gaming (DX9 only). It is a great test to identify potential problem areas with general performance on a system. It can also show how well a single component can increase or decrease system-wide performance. We run both the x86 and x64 PCMark Suites for testing.
The 890FXA-UD7 does not do terribly well at PCMark Vantage. This is possibly a result of the poor memory performance but could also be due to an issue with the way PCMark handles six CPU cores. Even overclocked with better memory performance we see lower than expected numbers here, at least when compared to P55 based motherboards. It does manage to outperform the Asus Crosshair IV, but only when overclocked.
3DMark Vantage -3DMark Vantage is the other FutureMark test that we run on our motherboards. This test simulates the typical tasks that a GPU (and system) would have to perform to provide you with a good gaming experience. It is based on the DX9 and DX10 engines but can only be installed on Windows Vista or later. The suite of tests covers DX9 rendering, DX10 rendering, AI computations and PhysX. The problem with the PhysX calculations is that nVidia owns that technology. This gives them an upper hand in the test runs, for this reason we will always run 3DMark Vantage with GPU PhysX enabled and disabled when we use an nVidia GPU in our testing. As we currently use an HD 5870 this will not be an issue for now.
For our 3DMark Vantage testing we find that the 890FXA-UD7 does not do too bad. It manages to keep ahead of most of the competition but lags behind the systems running either the Xeon or the 875K (understandably). It looks like we might be able to expect some good gaming performance from the 890FXA-UD7, but of course no synthetic test can tell the whole story.
HyperPi 0.99b -HyperPi is a front end application that allows you to easily run multiple instances of the SuperPi application. SuperPi, for those that are not familiar with it, is an application that measures the time it takes to calculate the number Pi out to as many as 32 million places. This calculation is then checked and run multiple times (up to 24 for a 32M run). This test stresses the CPU, Memory and HDD as data is handed off between the three. If there is a weak link, HyperPi will show it. For our testing we run the 32M test on as many cores (and threads) as the CPU has available. The slowest CPU time is then recorded.
The HyperPi scores we see here are a direct reflection of the memory performance we saw above. At stock speeds the slower RAM performance prevents the CPU from computing PI I faster. When we pushed the CPU speed (and also the memory speeds) we see these numbers jump disproportionately to the increase in clock speed. While the slower stock speeds are a little troubling it is comforting to know that by tweaking the memory (speed, CAS etc.) we know that we can improve on the somewhat.
Cinebench R11.5 -Cinenbench R11.5 is the 11th release of Moxon’s rendering test. This test is based off of the Cinema 4D engine, which is one of the industry standard tools for digital animation. It is a powerful product with many different modules that can be “plugged” into it to increase its effectiveness. With Cinebench you get to see how your computer would do using this application. There are two tests; one tests the CPU’s ability to render an image across multiple cores or threads. The other tests your systems ability to handle OpenGL based rendering.
The 890FXA-UD7 with our Phenom II X6 1090T does excellent at Cinebench rendering. This is most likely due to the small segments the render has been broken up into. But, no matter the cause it is good to know that you can use the Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7 for this type of workstation application.
