Maximum PC - Motherboards

Asus P9X79 Deluxe Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:26:12 +0000

A deluxe board with an enthusiast price tag

Let’s be frank: If you’re even thinking about buying into Intel’s deliciously fast LGA2011 platform this early, you are an enthusiast—Enthusiast with a capital-freaking-E, since you can’t even look at LGA2011 without buying a $550 chip.

So if you’re jumping in, you might as well use both feet. Asus’s P9X79 Deluxe certainly fits that bill, delivering cool features and a stout price tag: This X79-based board will set you back a cool $400.

“Deluxe” features on board include digital VRMs, Asus’s trademark UEFI, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, with a bundled smartphone app that enables you to remotely overclock and monitor your system. This board also has an all-new feature that lets you use a particular USB port to update its BIOS without a processor installed.

The P9X79 Deluxe offers top-notch performance and all the needed amenities.

The P9X79 is an eight-DIMM-slot board, not one of the weaker four-slot boards that limit your upgrade path. The eight-DIMM design will let you build a 32GB PC for less than $200 in memory cost. Doing that on any four-slot board will set you back more than $1,000. What do you do with 32GB? You set up a RAM drive, of course! We set up a RAM drive on this board using eight 4GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance RAM and saw read speeds of 4GB/s. Take that, SSDs!

But what you get in RAM, you lose in storage. The PCH in the X79 has the circuitry to support many more SAS and SATA 6Gb/s ports, but compatibility concerns caused board makers to “de-feature” it at the last minute. So instead of a board bristling with 10 SATA 6Gb/s ports, we get the standard Z68 layout of two SATA 6Gb/s and four SATA 3Gb/s. Asus tries to beef up the board’s six standard ports (four 3Gb/s and two 6Gb/s) with a Marvell 6Gb/s controller that also does SSD caching. Few of us could afford to install that many HDDs given today’s prices, of course, but that doesn’t render the lack of native support any less of a letdown—this is a $400 motherboard, after all.

We fired up Intel’s new DX79SI mobo to compare its performance to that of the P9X79. While we don’t normally expect to see big performance deltas between boards based on the same chipsets, the Asus board generally produced better benchmark numbers, with one significant exception: Intel’s board delivered much faster SATA 6Gb/s write speeds. We normally use OCZ’s Enyo external drive to test USB 3.0 performance, but the P9X79’s USB controller uses the new and speedier UASP protocol, so we also used an OWC SATA 6Gb/s drive inside a new Asus enclosure. With UASP, we saw USB 3.0 speeds climb to a nice 225MB/s read and 217MB/write. We would have liked to compare this to a USB 3.0 enclosure that doesn’t support UASP, but our generic USB 3.0 enclosures don’t seem to like any SATA 6Gb/s drives.

In the end, The P9X79 Deluxe gives you just about everything an enthusiast would truly want: SLI, tri-SLI, CrossFire X, PCIe 3.0, tons of overclocking features, lots of USB 3.0 ports, and truly fast performance (albeit only in comparison to the limited number of X79 boards we’ve seen so far). Now if only it had more SATA 6Gb/s ports and the price wasn’t so painful.

$400, www.asus.com

Asus M5A99X Evo Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:36:47 +0000

990-series board offers modern mobo amenities

To be honest, between Z68 this and Sandy Bridge that, we haven’t had much time to check out AMD's latest motherboard offerings.

It’s not that we don’t care; it’s just that the fire is burning on the other side of the fence these days. That’s not to say that the 990X chipset in Asus’s midrange M5A99X Evo is a slouch. As a real AM3+ board, it’s guaranteed to work with the upcoming Bulldozer line of CPUs from AMD. On the other hand, plenty of older 890FX boards will also work fine with Bulldozer, so is it even worth your time to check out a 990-series board? In a word: yes.

For one thing, these days most 890FX board designs are pretty dated. For example, not all feature USB 3.0 headers. The most exciting change with the 990 series, though, is SLI support. It’s not that we necessarily want to run two Nvidia cards in an AMD board, it’s that we want the freedom to pick our poison. A word to multicard users: The 990X chipset in the M5A99X doesn’t have the PCIe lanes of its performance-oriented 990FX kin. The dual x16 slots run at x8 speeds when running multi-GPUs while 990FX boards let you run two x16 slots at x16 speeds. It’s truly not a deal-breaker for most folks, as the difference in performance is negligible.

SLI, UEFI, and front-panel USB 3.0 are present in this midranger.

Despite its midrange price of around $150, the M5A99X Evo has plenty of features that make it better than older 890FX boards, such as a USB 3.0 header as well as newer and faster USB 3.0 chips. Performance, however, is virtually identical, as we discovered when we tested the M5A99X Evo against MSI’s 890FXA-GD70 board. Oddly, one area where the 990X spanked the MSI board was in SATA 6Gb/s. We're still investigating why, but the Asus is the clear winner.

We also saw a difference in USB 3.0 performance. Like many older boards, the MSI uses the NEC/Renasys USB 3.0 controller. The Asus uses the ASMedia controller, which is a tad bit faster in both reads and writes. We also tested the board with all DIMM slots loaded with DDR3/1333, as well as its performance booting an OS to an OCZ RevoDrive X2—no problems on either count. Our final test was installing a second GeForce GTX 580 card to see if SLI indeed worked. It did.

If there’s anything the Asus board is guilty of, it’s being boring. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. Sometimes you don’t want a board that’s loaded down with garish extras. The M5A99X Evo is pretty much a good midrange board that crosses all the t’s and dots all the i’s. With its ultra-modern UEFI, SLI, and front-panel USB 3.0, it’s a board that today may be pedestrian—but is nonetheless satisfying.

$155, www.asus.com

Llano vs Sandy Bridge: Which $500 PC is Right For You?

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 20:54:54 +0000

Can AMD's Llano offer decent gaming with integrated graphics? We aim to find out

Ever since Intel’s 810 “Whitney” chipset hit the streets in the late ’90s, integrated graphics have been synonymous with suckage. This year, though, integrated graphics have been making a comeback as Intel and AMD have put their might toward offering game-worthy graphics alongside the CPU.

Intel’s Sandy Bridge kicked off the trend earlier this year, but the best Intel has offered up is still lacking for gamers, even budget-constrained gamers. Enter AMD’s A-series chip. Code-named “Llano,” this chip merges a quad-core CPU with a discrete GPU to make AMD’s second-gen “APU.” To see just how well Llano performs, we took the parts from the $667 PC that we built in our August issue and paved over the Sandy Bridge board and processor with an AMD A8 X4 3850 CPU and A75 motherboard.

AMD's Llano Exposed

The A8 X4 3850 spends more than half of its transistors on graphics, while Intel uses less than a quarter on graphics.

The A-series is AMD's second part to sport the Fusion moniker. In this case, Fusion means the fusing of graphics and compute power into the CPU. The first product was AMD’s E-Series, the basis of our $340 rig in last September’s Build It. That part sips power and is extremely low-cost, but it’s also a bit soft on both compute and graphics. By using what’s essentially an Athlon II X4 core and Radeon HD 6550D in the A8 Llano chip, AMD believes it has the antidote to Intel’s Sandy Bridge chips on the low-end. While both chips feature integrated graphics, the vast majority of Intel’s Sandy Bridge chip is dedicated to x86 while AMD devotes more than half of its core to graphics. The x86 side of the chip uses the well-known K10 cores. For graphics, the top-end part features 400 cores, 20 texture units, and a core clock running at 600MHz. Llano is also AMD’s first chip built at a 32nm process, which helps keep the thermals to manageable levels. Overall, Llano may truly be the first CPU with integrated graphics that will satiate gamers—gamers on a tight budget, that is.

The Same but Different

For our build, we took our $667 PC and removed two parts: the Gigabyte GA-H67M-D2-B3 motherboard and the Intel 3.1GHz Core i3-2100. To ensure maximum comparability, we opted for a Gigabyte AMD motherboard, the A75M-S2V. Like the GA-H67M-D2-B3, the Socket FM1–based A75M-S2V is micro-ATX, sports but two DIMM slots, and costs just $90. For the CPU, we used the 2.9GHz A8 X4 3850. At $139, it’s slightly more expensive than we expected, but you get better graphics and a quad-core processor versus the dual-core in the Sandy Bridge, so it’s worth it—right? We’re also deleting the discrete Radeon HD 6790 card from our $667 rig. Because this box is aimed at entry-level gaming, we wanted to see which platform yields better integrated graphics results; we figured that a person going this route would eventually upgrade to discrete graphics. The rest of the components are identical to our build from August. For comparison, we’re showing both configs in the ingredients list.

Ingredients

	Llano		Sandy Bridge
GPU	Integrated		Integrated
CPU	2.9GHz A8 X4 3850	$139	3.1GHz Core i3-2100	$126
Motherboard	Gigabyte A75M-S2V	$90	Gigabyte GA-H67M-D2-B3	$90
PSU	Rosewill RG530-S12	$50	Rosewill RG530-S12	$50
RAM	Patriot 4GB DDR3/1333	$40	Patriot 4GB DDR3/1333	$40
Case	Rosewill R218	$30	Rosewill R218	$30
HDD	1TB WD Caviar Blue	$60	1TB WD Caviar Blue	$60
ODD	Samsung SH-S223	$22	Samsung SH-S223	$22
OS	Windows Home Premium 64-bit	$99	Windows Home Premium 64-bit	$99
Total		$530		$517

Building Tips

LLANO BUILDS AREN'T SO DIFFERENT FROM STANDARD CONFIGS, BUT HERE ARE SOME USEFUL TIPS

With the introduction of Llano, AMD is breaking from the single-socket philosophy it has held since Socket 939 was introduced in 2004. For now, at least, two sockets will be supported: the new Socket FM1 and the newish Socket AM3+. Socket AM3+ will primarily support the existing Phenom II and Athlon II chips, as well as the upcoming FX processors aimed at enthusiasts. Socket FM1 is geared toward entry-level users, all-in-one machines, and home theater PCs. Although the Llano CPUs look exactly the same as an older Phenom II on the heat-spreader side, the newer chip is physically incompatible with the latter’s socket. The good news is that AMD kept the same cooler design, so most Socket AM2+/AM3 coolers will work with FM1 boards. Installing the new FM1 chip is the same as installing a Phenom II or Athlon II, so if you’ve previously built such a rig, FM1 will offer no surprises in CPU or heatsink installation.

Socket FM1 is physically incompatible with Socket AM2/AM3 processors.

AMD has two FM1 chipsets: A75 and A55. The higher-end A75 has six SATA 6Gb/s ports and four native USB 3.0 ports. The lower-cost A55 chipset sheds the USB 3.0 ports, and its SATA ports are limited to 3Gb/s. Both APU/motherboard combos support dual-channel RAM up to DDR3/1866. While we kept the RAM costs low in our build by using DDR3/1333, folks hoping to get the most performance out of Llano’s GPU should consider paying for faster DDR3/1866 as it greatly increases the performance of the chip. That’s because unlike discrete graphics, which have their own local frame buffers, Llano (and Sandy Bridge, too) rely on main system memory. Generally, graphics can use as much bandwidth as you can throw at them, so DDR3/1866 or higher is recommended.

As we said earlier, the A75 chipset features all SATA 6Gb/s ports, so you don’t have to spend five minutes flipping through the manual to find the correct SATA ports. That’s a big improvement over Intel’s weak-sauce implementation of just two 6Gb/s ports.

A75 and A55 also support UEFI underpinnings to support booting from drives larger than 2.1TB. Not all boards will sport fancy UEFI interfaces, though; many will continue to support BIOS interfaces despite the UEFI underneath.

The A75 chipset in this Gigabyte board is the first to sport native USB 3.0.

Overclockers hoping to get a free gigahertz of performance should prepare to be disappointed. Despite the new 32nm process, AMD has clock-blocked you by locking the multipliers. The only option for overclocking is bumping up the reference clock (AMD’s equivalent of Intel’s base clock.) Overclocking by raising the reference clock, however, will goose other components, which may cause instability. It’s not great, but it’s slightly better than the Intel Sandy Bridge side, where B-clock overclocks are extremely difficult and the chipsets themselves can limit your overclocking capability.

The A8 X4 3850 spends half of its transistors on graphics and it shows.

Llano vs. Sandy Bridge

After we built our Llano rig, we benchmarked it using a subset of our standard system benchmark suite, as well as a few additional benchmarks to stress the capabilities of Llano and Sandy Bridge. For gaming, we threw out our standard über-tests, which are made to stress $5,000 PCs with multiple GPUs. Instead, we ran 3DMark Vantage at the Performance setting. We also ran vReveal, which leverages the GPU to enhance video. It’s one of the showcase apps used to illustrate the power of the GPU. We took a 1080p video shot on a Canon Rebel T1i, applied image enhancements and corrected the orientation. We also used the APU/GPU/CPU-dependent CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 and converted a large MPEG-2 file to a portable format for use in a tablet device. The benchmark is one of the tests that taps Intel’s hardware transcoding QuickSync circuits in Sandy Bridge.

The results speak for themselves. Where the benchmarks rely on the x86 side of the equation, the state-of-the-art dual-core Sandy Bridge processor easily spanks the antiquated quad-core Athlon II X4 processor. Even in benchmarks where multithreading is a heavy influencer, the Core i3-2100 smokes the A8 X4 3850 despite the A8 having double the cores of the Core i3-2100. That speaks to the efficiency of the Sandy Bridge cores and Intel’s Hyper-Threading. In graphics, the roles are reversed: AMD’s A8 X4 3850 absolutely destroys the Sandy Bridge integrated graphics across the board. For VReveal and MediaEspresso, it’s really about choosing your poison.

The A8 X4 3850 easily eclipses Core i3 in graphics chores but takes a back seat in compute chores.

We also tried a few games—Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, and The Sims 3—at small-panel resolutions of 1680x1050. The Sandy Bridge part was disappointing in all but Team Fortress 2. Llano was the opposite, with satisfactory performance across the board. In other words, it’s a mission accomplished for Llano. If you’re looking to build a low-cost machine that’ll give you reasonable gaming on your small panel, the A8 X4 3850 is a pretty damn good chip.

But that’s not the whole story. The weakness of the compute side can’t be overlooked. That a dual-core can badly trounce a quad-core in some multithreaded tasks tells you how creaky the K10 core is. What’s worse, upgraders looking forward may see the Sandy Bridge as a better part if they plan to drop in a midrange GPU. After all, with Sandy Bridge, you retain the better x86 performance, while on AMD you lose the strong integrated graphics but retain the weaker K10 cores. One setup, albeit limited, does favor Llano, though: A-series chips feature a hybrid CrossFire mode where the integrated GPU can work in CrossFire with a low-end card such as the Radeon HD 6670.

The upshot is that it really depends on where you hope to take your ultra-budget rig. Llano’s strength is in entry-level gaming for folks with modest aspirations for discrete graphics. CPU upgrades will continue to be supported, as AMD is committed to its new FM1 platform. Sandy Bridge is weaker in graphics, but it has far stronger x86 performance. It also has the stronger upgrade path, as the LGA1155 boards will support the über-fast Core i7-2600K and next year’s Ivy Bridge chips. We do have to question if that’s a realistic goal, though. Will anyone building a $500 PC today ever consider installing a $300 CPU next year? Probably not.

Overall, we like the Llano platform. The gaming performance you can get from a $500 PC these days is truly impressive. We’re not entirely sure Llano makes sense for desktop duties at this point, but in HTPCs, all-in-ones, and notebooks, AMD seems to have a winner.

Benchmarks: Core i3-2100 vs. A8 X4 3850

	Core i3-2100	A8 X4 3850
Vegas Pro 9	6,007	5,770
Lightroom 2.6	435	757 (-43%)
ProShow 4	1,749	2,152 (-19%)
Reference 1.6	3,840	3,767
3DMark Vantage	1,073	3,702 (245%)
3DMark Vantage GPU	827	3,066 (271%)
3DMark Vantage CPU	9,954	9,810 (-1%)
VReveal 3.0	151	76
MediaEspresso 6.5	311	411 (-24%)

Asus P8Z68-V Pro Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 21:59:04 +0000

New Z68 chipset makes big improvements over P67

When is a chipset truly a new chipset? That’s a question that many PC enthusiasts will ponder when they see the specs for Intel’s Z68 chipset, which is at the heart of the Asus P8Z68-V Pro board.

For one thing, there’s no native USB 3.0, no additional PCI-E lanes (which are tied to the CPU anyway), and still the paltry two SATA 6Gb/s ports that Intel included with the original P67 chipset’s PCH chip. If these negatives are enough to make you skip the rest of this review, know that you’re making a big mistake.

The Intel Z68 chipset in the Asus P8Z68-V Pro brings SSD caching and virtual graphics to Sandy Bridge.

That’s because the Z68 chipset in the P8Z68-V Pro offers several major advances over the P67: the ability to overclock the processor graphics in the Sandy Bridge CPU; Identity Protection Technology, which is essentially a hardware token integrated into the chipset and CPU; Smart Response Technology for SSD caching; and the ability to switch between the discrete and integrated graphics.

Of these four features, the biggest impact will come from the Smart Response Technology. SRT lets you use a relatively small, low-cost SSD to give your hard drive “SSD-like” performance. Intel actually claims around a 4x improvement with SRT over an HDD alone.

On the graphics side, the P8Z68-V Pro board bundles LucidLogix’s Virtu software, which lets you “switch” graphics modes. There are two modes available in Virtu on the P8Z68-V Pro: i-mode and d-mode. I-mode lets you plug your monitor into the integrated graphics port on the board. Most of your chores will run off the processor graphics, but kick on a game and the discrete GPU takes over. It actually works, but i-mode doesn’t support SLI. And the main reason to run it, power savings, isn’t hugely material as the GPU doesn’t actually turn off. You’ll also have to wait for profiles from LucidLogix for new games support. Another weakness of the feature is lack of support for dual-link DVI, so you can rule out 30-inch, high-res panels. Most people, however, will use d-mode, which runs off the discrete GPU. This mode lets you access the Intel Quick Sync video encoding technology in the CPU. In our encoding tests, we found Quick Sync to run roughly 30 percent faster than the mighty GeForce GTX 580 when encoding video using CyberLink’s MediaEspresso 6.5. Zow!

The integrated DVI port can be used in combination with your discrete card, but lacks dual-link DVI support.

The board itself is a near replica of the P67-based P8P67 Pro board in layout, SATA ports, and slots. With the PCI-E and memory controller integrated into the CPU and the exact same PCH as the P67 chipset, performance between the P8P67 Pro or Deluxe and the P8Z68-V Pro is a wash. That is, until you factor in the SRT SSD caching, which is a big boost for folks who intend to primarily run a hard drive. If you look at the benchmark charts you can see the impact of SRT, which also felt faster in general use than a hard drive alone.

The best performance will always come from running the SSD as your primary disk, but then you are limited by size and are always managing your data between the SSD and HDD. With SRT, you have all the spatial freedom of a fast 3TB drive with much of the performance of an SSD. One thing to note: The Maximized mode gives you the best write performance, but you run the risk of data loss should your system lose power or blue-screen suddenly during a large write. Enhanced mode is safer, but your fastest write is at the speed of the hard drive.

So what do we think of the P8Z68-V Pro board? We probably would not upgrade to it if we were running a P67. We view SRT and the Quick Sync access as valuable, but not quite worth the hassle of an upgrade. But this board is the clear choice if you’re building a new mainstream PC.

$210, www.asus.com

Gigabyte G1.Assassin Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 20 May 2011 17:09:47 +0000

The ultimate X58 motherboard?

Gigabyte really went all out with the weapon-themed G1.Assassin board, but for folks who don’t know: It’s a motherboard, not a weapon. Repeat: not a weapon.

And just in case someone thought you could somehow slap the magazine-shaped heatsink into your M4A1 and start rocking the happy switch, you can’t. Gigabyte says as much with a warning label on the end of the heatsink/magazine: “Heatsink: Not a weapon. Cannot be assembled as a weapon.”

Big and bold, the X58 takes the kitchen sink approach to motherboards.

One thing is for sure: The G1.Assassin might very well be the most stacked and packed X58 motherboard available today. Three factors lead us to this conclusion: The board follows the not-quite-homologated XL-ATX size and measures a whopping 13.58x10.35 inches; it features a real Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi 20K2 chip; and it’s the first board we know of that uses an onboard Bigfoot Networks Killer NIC E2100.

The eyebrow raiser is, of course, the Killer NIC E2100. The card promises lower ping times and higher frame rates but its ability to live up to that promise has never been universally agreed upon. While some reviewers have said it can cough up extra frames and lower pings, others (including Maximum PC) have maintained that the difference hasn’t been worth the price of admission.

That’s also what a lot of gamers are saying about Creative’s X-Fi cards these days. Once a must-have for any serious gamer, today many PC builders forego an add-on soundcard for the free onboard variety.

Straight out of a James Bond movie, the G1.Assassin “barrel” actually helps keep the voltage regulators cool.

That’s where the G1.Assassin gets really interesting, though. If you are theoretically getting an X-Fi Titanium, which is worth about $99, and the Killer NIC E2100 (worth about $90), that should make the board a steal, right? Well, here’s the dig. The G1.Assassin tips the scales at $530, which makes it the priciest X58 board we know of.

To be fair, you are still getting a lot for your money with the G1.Assassin (assuming, of course, that you had your heart set on buying the Killer NIC and X-Fi). Besides the X-Fi and Bigfoot chips, Gigabyte gives you eight USB 3.0 ports (four with header) by way of an NEC/VIA controller/hub combo and SATA 6Gb/s by way of a Marvell 9128 chip. There’s no love for eSATA, but few will likely miss it.

One other feature glaringly missing from the G1.Assassin is support for four-way SLI. The board features four x16 physical slots, which can be configured to support SLI, tri-SLI, CrossFireX, or quad CrossFireX. Why no four-way SLI? That’s likely because Gigabyte didn’t include Nvidia’s nForce 200 chips, which would have driven the cost up even more.

Do not insert this in your carbine and expect it to work.

In performance, it’s a wash. As always, performance margins are rarely a deciding factor (although the Intel DX58SO2 board represents well here). It’s about features. If you intend to build an all-out, over-the-top X58 system, the G1.Assassin isn’t a bad pick. Just know that you also need to buy an XL-ATX case for it. If that’s a turn-off, the G1.Sniper is the same board but on standard ATX and lacking support for four GPUs. You should also know that LGA1366 is a dead man walking at this point.

So, while we give Gigabyte props for going hog-wild crazy, a lot of people are going to question if the timing of it is right or not.

$530, www.gigabyte.com

Mvix Minix 890GX-USB3 Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 18 May 2011 19:56:59 +0000

Small, powerful, and flexible

Nothing illustrates our problem with MSI’s E350IA-E45 mobo (reviewed last month) better than the Mvix Minix 890GX-USB3.

Manufactured for Mvix by J&W, the Minix pretty much solves the primary issue we had with MSI’s Fusion-based mother-board: While the MSI board featured a soldered-on CPU in the form of a Fusion E-350, the Minix is far more traditional in that you pair your board with the processor that best suits your needs.

In this case, Mvix gives you an AM3 socket with standard AMD cooling brackets. This lets you run a standard cooler. However, lower-profile cooling units we tried, such as the Silverstone NT07, were an extremely tight fit, to the point where the heatsink literally sat on one of the caps and jumpers. Not good.

In the features department, Mvix hits all the highlights. There’s AMD’s 890GX chipset with the SB850 south bridge, an NEC USB 3.0 controller, the Realtek audio codec, and not one, but two Gigabit ports powered by Broadcom PHYs. Why two? Mini-ITX boards often find themselves pulling duties in odd places, and dual Gigabit ports could accommodate the board’s use as a home-brew router or NAS.

Despite the excitement over AMD’s Fusion, AM3 still has something to offer.

We like that Mvix includes built-in 802.11n. We know a USB dongle is an easy fix, but this is extremely convenient. It’s also a feature MSI neglected.

We tested the Minix 890GX-USB3 with an AMD energy-efficient, 65-watt, 2.6GHz Phenom II X4 910e. Interestingly, Mvix says the board is Phenom II X6 ready, but rates the board for a maximum of 95 watts. We know of no Phenom II X6 processors that have TDP ratings of less than 125 watts. While those are worst-case scenario ratings by AMD, we’d rather err on the side of caution and stick with a 95-watt or lower proc.

Booting the board with the Phenom II and 4GB of RAM, we realized exactly what’s wrong with both Fusion and Atom—their x86 performance. Simply put, the Phenom II gives you “real” x86 performance and never feels bogged down. With both Atom and Fusion, Windows 7 doesn’t feel responsive enough.

In graphics, however, the newer Fusion part does outpace its sibling. This gaming prowess (at low resolutions anyway) isn’t always reflected in our benchmarks. The higher clock speed and faster x86 performance of Phenom II made the older Athlon 64 core in Fusion look far weaker than it actually is. The good news is that the 890GX had just enough juice to run all of the HD video we threw at it. In areas where the 890GX was lacking in graphics performance, its faster x86 cores made up for the shortcoming.

This brings us back to our original premise: Fusion boards with soldered-in CPUs lock you into that CPU, er, APU performance. Traditional boards like the Minix let you run a processor of your choice, be it a 35-watt power-sipping proc or a high-clocked multicore jobbie. Our take is that flexibility is a valuable commodity in a motherboard. Of course, there is also the matter of price. With a street price of $200, the Minix 890GX-USB3 is about $60 more expensive than comparable MITX AM3 boards from Asus and Zotac.

$200, www.mvixusa.com

Intel DX58SO2 Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:40:44 +0000

Can Intel’s board divisionshake its ho-hum history?

Using the words “Intel motherboard” and “enthusiast” in the same sentence is like the old oxymoron “military intelligence.” It just doesn’t ring true.

Intel’s reputation might finally be on the mend with its new DX58SO2, or “Smackover 2,” which makes huge leaps over its predecessor, the DX58SO.

First up: the SATA ports. The original DX58SO had SATA ports that pointed straight up. That’s an epic fail if you plan to run multiple GPUs. The DX58SO2 fixes that by placing all eight ports at right angles. Perhaps the biggest problem with the original Smackover was its paltry four slots for memory instead of the customary six slots that all the other enthusiast boards had at the time. We’re happy to report that this new version sports the requisite six.

The DX58SO2 even lets you overclock using surface-mounted buttons.

But that’s not all of the improvements. SLI, CrossFireX, and even tri-SLI are now supported out of the box. Furthermore, the original board required several wacky power connectors for multi-GPU configurations, and the overall placement of everything was strange. The Smackover 2 has none of that. The only thing to complain about is the placement of the x16 PCI-E slots. If you run two GPUs (most commonly in the form of dual videocards), you block access to the sole PCI slot. That’s a non-issue for most of us in this post-PCI world.

Additional enthusiast features include a full complement of surface-mounted switches for power, reset, and tweaking the base clock. Intel also tosses in a POST LED, which displays numbers that correspond to the individual steps of the boot process; a handy guide details what the cryptic numbers mean.

The X58 “Tylersburg” chipset is ancient at this point, so Intel beefs it up to current specs by adding an NEC USB 3.0 controller and a Marvell SATA 6Gb/s chip. One thing Intel missed, however, was support for the new USB 3.0 header.

A board’s quality doesn’t revolve entirely around how components are laid out, however: We also consider the bundled utilities and the polish each maker puts into its product. Intel mostly gets it right. The company’s XTU tuning utility has matured nicely and its Desktop Utilities for monitoring the system work well. We also found the company’s bureaucratically named Integrator Assistant useful; it sounds like an accounting inventory utility but can be used to update the BIOS or tweak it from within the OS.

In performance, the board is no slouch. As we’ve been saying for some time, performance within the same chipset family rarely varies. Oddly, the Smackover 2 ran faster in PC Mark Vantage and a few of our memory benchmarks. Elsewhere, it was dead even with the last four X58 boards we’ve tested.

So, again, performance is not an issue. It’s about features and the warm, safe embrace of Intel. In this department, the board is on par with typical enthusiast boards out there in the same price range.

$250, www.intel.com

Fatal1ty P67 Professional Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 17:14:36 +0000

For professional use only

Celebrities and athletes have great sway over how and what we buy. Cars that win NASCAR races peak consumer interest. Gear that we see experts and athletes use on TV generates far more interest than run-of-the-mill hardware.

So for people who want a board optimized for a badass gamer like Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel, it makes sense to buy his Fatal1ty P67 Professional motherboard.

The Fatal1ty P67 Professional has support for up to three ATI cards or two Nvidia graphic cards.

Obviously, Fatal1ty didn’t buy a motherboard company. The board is actually made and supported by the Asus spin-off, Asrock. Once known as a budget board company, Asrock these days certainly hasn’t been churning out budget products. Given Fatal1ty’s influence, it’s no surprise that the Professional targets devoted gamers. It supports up to three ATI GPUs in CrossFireX mode and Nvidia in SLI mode—but, alas, there’s no tri-SLI support courtesy of an nForce 200 chip like we saw in the Gigabyte P67A-UD7 board we reviewed last month.

The Professional features a tunable USB 2.0 mouse port.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing features of the board is its Fatal1ty USB 2.0 mouse port that allows you to tune the polling rate from 125Hz to 1,000Hz (Fatal1ty, BTW, prefers a 500Hz poll rate). It’s a cool feature for folks who really need to tune their mouse to match a particular game’s frame rate. For Joe 12-pack playing pickup games of Call of Duty: Black Ops, we wouldn’t expect miracles. More troubling: We tried several top-flight gaming mice, including a SteelSeries iKari, CM Storm twin-laser Sentinel Advance, and a Microsoft SideWinder, and none of the mice—which incidentally feature adjustable DPI rates—would work with the port.
The port did, however, work with an older, non-adjustable Razer Pro and a $6 Dell mouse.

In another first, the Fatal1ty P67 Professional features the Etron USB 3.0 host controller chip, instead of the NEC (now Renesas) chip we’ve seen in other boards. Etron promises higher throughput, but does it deliver? Yes and no. Using a very fast OCZ Enyo USB 3.0 drive as our target, the Etron chip was faster than boards that use just the NEC controller. But boards such as Gigabyte’s P67A-UD7, using the NEC+VIA combo, offered slightly better performance. Expect more on this in the future.

The Etron controller is truly faster than a standard NEC’s USB 3.0 host controller.

In pure performance, the Fatal1ty board hangs right there with other P67 offerings from the top-tier board makers. Like those, the Professional boots fine with 3TB partitions, thanks to its UEFI. The UEFI interface is OK—although you’ll have to make your tweaks with a background image of Fatal1ty glaring at you the whole time. It’s on par with MSI’s UEFI interface, but both trail behind Asus’s super-polished UEFI interface.

Overclocking was also fine—when done from the UEFI. We had less luck with the included OC utility, which would occasionally blue-screen from simply dialing up the multiplier for the 2600K part to 4.5GHz. The same overclock from the BIOS gave us no issues.

There’s some nice trim on the board, including a POST indicator and surface- mounted controls.

And while it’s not a problem per se, it’s a bit odd that the board features a parallel ATA port and floppy port in this day and age. We don’t know why Asrock bothered to waste real estate on these legacy ports.

Overall, the Fatal1ty is a solid board that offers a ton of features for the money. As we said, Asrock has traditionally been associated with budget and ultra- budget boards, but this should make other board makers take notice.

$250, www.asrock.com

MSI E350IA-E45 Fusion Motherboard Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:02:48 +0000

Fusion lands, but is it enough?

It’s a little difficult to review MSI’s new Fusion-based E350IA-E45. Normally, our motherboard reviews consider the CPU as an adjunct to the board since consumers may populate the board with one of numerous CPUs.

That’s not so with the Mini-ITX MSI E350IA-E45 which, as its name implies, incorporates AMD’s brand new 1.6GHz E-350 with AMD’s Radeon HD 6310 graphics part soldered to the board, so you better be happy with the CPU you get.

Fortunately, AMD’s new Accelerated Processing Unit has a lot going for it. For those who don’t know, the APU enmeshes a dual-core x86 core with a fairly powerful graphics core.

MSI’s Fusion board sips power and can play The Sim 3 too

The x86 side of the E-350 chip is nothing to write home about. It’s essentially a slightly narrower iteration of an Athlon 64 core that will outperform or underperform an equivalent Athlon 64 depending on the application that is being run. More exciting is the graphics core, which features 80 Radeon cores all at a very low temperature and low power consumption. How low? At idle – with a very ungreen WD Raptor drive attached and USB optical drive, the entire system drank 28 watts at idle. Watching 1080P video on YouTube pushed it to about 35 to 38 Watts at the wall.

In a preview late last year, we were impressed by the graphics capability of Fusion and we weren’t disappointed in official Lab tests. Before you get too excited – you need to lower your expectations about five notches and then climb down into the basement if you’re expecting GTX 580 graphics and a free Sandy Bridge to boot for $130. The E350IA-E45 is capable of Blu-ray playback, and played 1080P content on the Internet without issues.

But what about gaming? Here we get conflicted. We think Fusion is a great alternative to Intel’s weak Atom line of processors and integrated graphics in notebooks and netbooks. In a desktop computer, however, you’re not as confined as you are with mobile. With that said, the Fusion and MSI board combo does give you playable performance in Sims 3, and somewhat acceptable frame rates in Left 4 Dead 2 as well as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. We found it wanting at Call of Duty: Black Ops though. When we say playable, we mean at low resolutions such as 1024x768. So, while gaming is far improved over Atom machines with integrated graphics, you won’t be playing at high-res. The board is perfect for someone building a low-power, quiet HDTV streaming or web box. It’s also fine for someone building a miniature PC that will be tucked behind the monitor.

But, and you knew we would say but, our personal preference is for more heft. Say a Core i3 with discrete graphics ala the Kick-ass (and super expensive) Asrock Vision 3D HTPC we reviewed last month. Or even a socketed AM3 processor part.

That’s not to say the E350IA-E45 has no utility, but you need to calibrate your expectations. In the end, Fusion is clearly a better option than Atom with integrated graphics. It's not everything we wanted, but it's a good beginning.

Motherboard Mano-a-Mano: We Review Three LGA1155 Boards!

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 01:18:58 +0000

The brave new world of LGA1155

There’s good news and bad news for Intel lovers. The bad news is for folks who just bought a motherboard using the LGA1156 socket: Yup, it’s obsolete already. The good news: The LGA1155 motherboards using Intel’s performance P67 chipset are swimming with improvements such as native SATA 6Gb/s support, front-panel USB 3.0 headers, and UEFI. The biggest change, of course, is support for Intel’s new line of Sandy Bridge CPUs. These second-generation Core ix processors are not only fast, they’re cheap and overclock like hell. To find a suitable home for your new Sandy Bridge chip, we gathered up boards from old foes MSI, Asus and Gigabyte to see whose next-gen motherboard deserves the honor. Our mini roundup not only gives you a glance at what the latest P67 boards give you, but it gives you an idea of what you're getting for your money. The MSI board here is a surpringly capable sub-$200 board, while the Asus laddles on features for another sixty bucks. Finally, the Gigabyte represents just what you're going to get when you crack that $300 pricer barrier. What's right for you? Read on to find out.

Asus P8P67 Deluxe

We’ll be honest: We’ve had the most hands-on time with Asus’s new P8P67 Deluxe board of any P67-based board this cycle. That’s because Asus sent a functioning board to us far before its competitors (including Intel) did, and as such, we conducted the bulk of our Sandy Bridge chip testing with the P8P67 Deluxe board.

Usually, early boards mean soldered-on wires, unpredictable performance, and hiccups that are often a consequence of very early hardware. None of that was true of the P8P67 Deluxe board. Out of the box, it offered rock-solid stability and its performance was excellent across the board.

Front-panel USB 3.0 is finally a reality with Asus’s P8P67 Deluxe.

POST the P8P67 Deluxe and you’ll notice the first big change: Universal Extensible Firmware Interface, or UEFI. The arrival of UEFI on the PC might feel like that long-awaited unicorn bar mitzvah, but it’s actually been around for some time. Numerous Intel boards have had UEFI but you’d never know it from looking at their BIOS-like interface.

You won’t get that feeling from the P8P67 Deluxe board, and any misgivings you have regarding the change to UEFI will likely vanish when you see the beautiful interface Asus has developed. The configuration screen alone will remind you how ancient that 16-bit BIOS is. Navigating the UEFI isn’t as intuitive if you’re used to moving about a BIOS, but it’s a brave new world we like.

On the hardware front, Asus packs a lot into this $240 motherboard. With Intel finally releasing a spec for a USB 3.0 internal header, Asus takes advantage by including a 3.5-inch drive-bay adapter with two USB 3.0 ports to boot. Why is this needed? Previously, case enclosures that included front USB 3.0 required you to run cables out of the back of the case and plug into the rear USB 3.0 ports. This eats up your USB 3.0 ports and is inelegant, to say the least. The Deluxe board gives you two front USB 3.0 ports, plus the two on the rear.

The USB 3.0 isn’t native to the P67 chipset, but the SATA 6Gb/s is. Sort of. Intel finally adds SATA 6Gb/s but only two of the ports in the P67’s peripheral controller hub have it. Why? To save money. Intel says running more than two ports would add additional pin-outs to the PCH and, well, that costs dinero. The result is a horrific headache of port confusion. On feature-rich boards like the P8P67 Deluxe, this gives you four SATA 3Gb/s ports plus two SATA 6Gb/s off of the Intel PCH. Add another two SATA 6Gb/s from the Marvell 9128 controller and your SATA mode will greatly depend on which port you luck yourself into. You’ll definitely want to run the Intel SATA 6Gb/s over the Marvell because it’s faster, but you have to RTFM first.

Also cool, but a bit tricky, is the inclusion of Asus’s nifty Bluetooth control option for the board, which lets you boot, reset, shut down, and overclock the board remotely from popular smartphones. Asus said it tweaked the Bluetooth stack and app to make it easier to transfer files from your phone, too. While that aspect worked fine with our Android phone, we couldn’t get the remote capability up and running. We’ve tested it successfully on other Asus boards, so we suspect that it’s a side effect of the early application, or us.

In general performance, the Asus board held its own against the MSI, but both boards traded wins and losses. In other words, don’t consider performance a deciding factor. We’d rather that you look at price, layout, and features. In those respects, it’s hard not to recommend the P8P67 Deluxe as a worthy ride for your new Sandy Bridge chip.

Asus P8P67 Deluxe

UEFI! Native SATA 6Gb/s

Confusing SATA ports; pre-release drivers are a little wonky.

MSI P67A-GD65

We love Sandy Bridge, and we even like some aspects of the P67 chipset. But, we’ll say it again: Intel’s decision to cheap-out on SATA 6Gb/s will create massive port confusion. With the Asus board, we had to RTFM to figure out which port went to which controller and at what speed. The situation is murkier with the P67A-GD65. The board features eight SATA ports and tells you which are SATA 6Gb/s. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you which controller they’re running off of.

Windows 7 is so smart, though, that it will boot a board on the Marvell controller without missing a beat. However, if you’re running a SATA 6Gb/s drive, you’ll want to be on the Intel PCH, which is a good clip faster than the Marvell part. Unfortunately, the European manual that came with our early review board didn’t tell us which controller ran which ports. The only way to figure it out was to plug in the drive, boot the board, and see which controller initialized in the BIOS.

MSI’s P67A-GD65 is a screaming deal.

But let’s not get sidetracked. Despite this minor documentation issue (perhaps Europeans can sense what port to use), the P67A-GD65 is a solid board that’s seriously cheaper than the Asus board on the facing page. And despite costing $60 less than the Asus P67 mobo, the P67A-GD65 is almost on par with its competitor. It has a secondary SATA 6Gb/s controller, an NEC USB 3.0 controller with two ports, and an additional two ports on a USB 3.0 dongle. What you don’t get is the built-in Bluetooth features of the Asus board, nor its dual-Gigabit ports or front USB 3.0 bay, either. And while Asus gives you a choice of a Realtek network PHY or an Intel PHY, the P67A-GD65 gives you only the former. MSI does, however, give you access to Creative Lab’s X-Fi algorithms. And in a tip of the hat to super-duper overclockers, the board also features a header to directly measure voltages off the board.

Like the Asus board, we tested whether this board could boot to a 3TB Western Digital drive, and it passed. Both also offered good USB 3.0 speed, ran SLI just fine, and offered comparable SATA 6Gb/s performance.

One feature that’s slightly disappointing is the MSI ClickBIOS. MSI actually planned to release a board with UEFI more than a year ago, but that board never materialized. Still, we thought the early lead MSI had would have resulted in a highly polished UEFI interface. It’s not terrible, but at times, the interface felt, well, like a BIOS, but with mouse navigation.

We tested all of the boards here with some mild overclocking, pushing our 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K to 4.5GHz using the wimpy stock cooler. As expected, both passed just fine. Our only issue with the MSI board came with installing the drivers for the Creative audio. As with the Asus board, we’ll chalk it up to early drivers or installers. For example, some of the drivers came on a USB key from the press office, so they’re clearly not final.

Overall, the P67A-GD65 doesn’t quite have the panache or super-smooth UEFI interface of the Asus, but it’s also cheaper. In this economy, if that makes the difference to you owning a GeForce GTX 580, it’s worth it.

MSI P67A-GD65

UEFI! Native SATA 6Gb/s; seriously cheap

Really confusing SATA ports; pre-release drivers are slightly wonky.

Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7

If there’s one thing we know about Gigabyte, it’s that the mobo maker loves USB 3.0. We mean, it loves USB 3.0. How much? The company has been pushing USB 3.0 as its number one feature for a while now, and this tact has apparently worked. The company claims that it’s the No. 1 USB 3.0 motherboard company, whatever that means.

The GA-P67A-UD7 is the pinnacle of USB 3.0 boards to make it in to our hands. Most USB 3.0 boards sport two ports, which is the maximum a single NEC USB host controller will support. Newer boards add another two more ports with a second NEC controller.

Gigabyte goes plumb crazy with six USB 3.0 ports in back plus two USB 3.0 headers for a total of ten possible ports. Gigabyte does this by using two VIA USB 3.0 hub controllers. To be fair, Gigabyte isn’t the only company to do this – we saw a pre-production Asus board with the same hub chips too. But this development still safely consolidates Gigabyte’s position as the king of USB 3.0.

Besides a new color scheme, the UD7 features a ton of USB 3.0 ports and an nForce 200 chip

We’re not just being smart asses either. Despite using the same NEC controller, the GA-P67A-UD7 actually pulled in noticeably better (180MB/s vs 156MB/s) USB 3.0 performance than the MSI P67A-GD65 and Asus P8P67 Deluxe boards. IO on the Marvell and Intel 6Gb/s ports was also better.

In other benchmarks, the UD7 ran just about even with the Asus and MSI. As we’ve said before, the competition usually boils down to features and not pure numbers for boards using the same chipset. In features, the UD7 is a mixed bag. Boot up the board, and you’ll not be greeted by a pretty-as-hell UEFI interface. Instead, it’s what Gigabyte calls a “hybrid UEFI.” It has UEFI underpinnings but the company said it stuck with its tried and true (and boring) BIOS interface. Whether you’re into UEFI or not, the most important feature today is the support of booting from partitions larger than 2TB and the UD7 is fine. Thankfully, the board booted fine from our WD 3TB Caviar drive.

Overclocking on the board was straight-laced. While the Asus would only overclock via Turbo Boost multipliers, the UD7 was old fashioned and allowed us to crank the CPU multiplier up and reboot. Like all P67 boards, we performed a mild overclock and took our 3.4GHz Core i7 2600K to 4.5GHz using a stock heat sink. All went fine, and it’s really hard to say which method works better. But we’d prefer options to do both.

Perhaps the most eye-opening feature of the GD7 is its nForce 200. Standard P67 boards can’t run more than two GPUs effectively but using the nVidia nForce 200 chip, you can run up to three GeForce cards. Standard P67 chipset boards are best suited for two GPUs, but by integrating an nForce 200 chip, the UD7 can run three double-width GPUs. We tested the UD7 using three GeForce GTX 580 cards and we weren’t disappointed. We actually found the three cards scale nicely if you run either brand new, taxing DX11 games, or if you run older games at super high resolution. One question you'll have to ask yourself before you plunge into a board capable of running tri-SLI is whether you need it. That nForce 200 chip isn't free and certainly contributes to the higher price of the UD7. If you're pretty sure that you're never going to put out the cash for three GPUs, it makes a lot more sense to buy a board without the nForce chip.

Despite its somewhat boring BIOS, there’s little to dislike on the UD7. If we were to pick something to ding Gigabyte over, it’s the lack of USB 3.0 dongles. Both MSI and Asus give you either additional rear USB 3.0 ports that plug into the onboard header or a front bay adapter with ports. Gigabyte gives you none. Considering its steep price of $320, that’s a bit of a burn.

Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7

Tons of USB 3.0 ports, Tri-SLI support

No UEFI and no USB 3.0 adapters.

Benchmarks

	Asus P8P67 Deluxe	MSI P67A-GD65	Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7
PCMark Vantage 64-bit Overall	11,250	10,388	10,556
Everest Ultimate MEM Read (MB/s)	16,110	16,492	16,501
Everest Ultimate MEM Write (MB/s)	16,757	18,602	18,592
Everest Ultimate MEM Copy (MB/s)	25,128	21,628	21,324
Everest Ultimate MEM Latency (ns)	35.8	53.5	52.3
SiSoft Sandra RAM Bandwidth (GB/s)	15.7	15.8	15.6
3DMark Vantage Overall	14,845	15,214	14,471
3DMark Vantage GPU	11,947	12,287	11,871
3DMark Vantage CPU	54,470	53,282	53,670
Valve Particle Test (fps)	180	177	178
Resident Evil 5 low-res (fps)	132	131.7	131.3
HAWX low-res (fps)	244	247	234
HD Tune Pro Sustained Write w/ Marvell 6GB/s Controller (MB/s)	208	202.4	237
HD Tune Pro Burst (MB/s) (Marvell)	157	167	174
HD Tune Pro Sustained Write w/Intel 6GB/s Controller (MB/s)	256.7	242	267.1
HD Tune Pro Burst (MB/s) (Intel)	170	204	191.2
HD Tune USB 3.0 (MB/s)	155.6	156	180

We tested all three boards using an Intel 3.4GHz Core i7 2600K, 4GB of Corsair DDR3/1333, GeForce GTX 280, 64-bit Windows 7 and WD Raptor 150GB hard drive. USB 3.0 performance testing used an OCZ Enyo drive. SATA 6Gb/s testing used a Crucial C300 SSD.