ASRock 890GX Extreme 4 Motherboard - Test Setup, HDD Testing and More
Test System Specs:
While we tried to come up with a similar system for comparing some of the performance on this board, we really had nothing that came close for a comparison. Although we have recently reviewed the ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4, we have very different CPUs and GPUs in these systems. Still, we will compare a few results - not so much to compare motherboard performance, but to compare system performance when comparing a quad-core Phenom II X4 965 with a Phenom II X6 1050T. Other systems are included in tests such as direct CPU tests, network performance and others, but they are included for reference only.
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ASRock 890GX Extreme 4
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ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4
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CPU
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AMD Phenom II X6 1050T
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AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE |
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Motherboard
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ASRock 890GX Extreme 4
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Memory
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Graphics
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Radeon HD 5870 1GB
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NVIDIA 9800GTX 512MB
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Cooling
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Stock
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Stock
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Hard
Drives
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Western Digital 300GB Raptor
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Operating
System
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Windows 7 Ultimate x64
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Windows 7 Ultimate x64
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GPU Drivers
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Catalyst 10.8
Drivers
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Forceware 258.96 Drivers
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Subsystem Tests - HDD:
We start off the subsystem testing with some HDD tests. For the CrystalDiskMark test below we used the 128GB RealSSD from Crucial that is arguable one of the fastest SATA 3.0 around.
You'll notice that CrystalDiskMark shows pretty decent performance as it provides over 340MB/sec sequential read performance. 4K performance is very good on this drive as well as on this motherboard.
Subsystem Tests - Network:
One area that we have started testing is network performance. It is easy for a company to claim great networking features as many users never test them out and are puzzled when they can only transfer files at a mere 250Mbit/sec on their 1000Mbit/sec NIC. We use iPerf for testing network performance and on this board we tested out both wired and wireless performance.
Subsystem Tests - Audio:
In the past, we've used RightMark Audio Analyzer to test audio performance, but we've had quite a few issues with it in Windows 7 lately so we've actually had to drop this test from the suite. The 890GX Extreme 4 does feature a Realtek ALC892 Codec that supports THX TrueSudioPro, full digital audio and high quality and bitrate. I had no issues with it, and when plugged into some expensive Axiom speakers, it sounded very good.
On the next page we'll cover some synthetic benchmarks relating to system performance and memory before we jump into real world tests and gaming.
