ASUS F2A85-V Pro Review: A Look at FM2 with A85X
by Ian Cutress on October 10, 2012 11:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Asus
- Trinity
- FM2
- A85X
As part of the ever evolving motherboard benchmark suite, it has been suggested that we add in a few new benchmarks. In this case, we have added Portal 2 using the same timedemo from our GPU and Notebook reviews, and Batman: Arkham Asylum using the in game benchmark.
Portal 2
A stalwart of the Source engine, Portal 2 is the big hit of 2011 following on from the original award-winning Portal. In our testing suite, Portal 2 performance should be indicative of CS:GO performance to a certain extent. Here we test Portal 2 at 2560x1440 with maximum graphical setting using the same timedemo used in our GPU and notebook reviews.
Portal 2 seems to enjoy the GPU power, and CPU power does not matter as much. Scaling beyond 2 AMD GPUs on Trinity seems non-existant.
Dirt 3
Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. Using the in game benchmark, Dirt 3 is run at 2560x1440 with full graphical settings. Results are reported as the average frame rate across four runs.
As seen in the past, Dirt3 on AMD loves CPU MHz, GPU horsepower, everything. In the case of Trinity, the lack of grunt by the CPU does give it a lower result than the rest of our testing. Three-way GPU is crippled by that 4x PCIe 2.0 port at the bottom of the board.
In contrast, using an NVIDIA GPU means that the GPU becomes the limiting factor rather than the CPU.
Metro2033
Metro2033 is a DX11 benchmark that challenges every system that tries to run it at any high-end settings. Developed by 4A Games and released in March 2010, we use the inbuilt DirectX 11 Frontline benchmark to test the hardware at 2560x1440 with full graphical settings. Results are given as the average frame rate from 4 runs.
With Metro2033 we see similar results to Dirt3 - on AMD scaling is not that great and the GPU needs some CPU power to keep being fed. On AMD the results are better, making the GPU the limiting factor.
Batman Arkham Asylum
Made in 2009, Batman:AA uses the Unreal Engine 3 to create what was called “the Most Critically Acclaimed Superhero Game Ever”, awarded in the Guinness World Record books with an average score of 91.67 from reviewers. The game boasts several awards including a BAFTA. Here we use the in-game benchmark while at the highest specification settings without PhysX at 2560x1440. Results are reported to the nearest FPS, and as such we take 4 runs and take the average value of the final three, as the first result is sometimes +33% more than normal.
Our Batman results are highly odd. On one card it seems that the CPU holds the frame rate back, but in a three-way GPU setup the frame rate decreases - this may due to the 4x PCIe 2.0 port is restricting data flow needed by other GPUs.
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zappb - Sunday, November 4, 2012 - link
I just build 3 of these office machines (prices in euros before VAT / sales tax)AMD A6-5400K - 50
Asrock FM2A75M - DGS - 45
Fractal Core 1000 - 30
Intel 330 120 GB ssd - 75
Mushkin 4GB ddr3 -1600- 13
Be quiet pure power L7 300w - 32
Win8 pro oem (w/Start8)a 110
Office 2010 pro 100
Hardware comes to €245, and if I could have sourced the A4-5300, would have knocked another 15 off that. Amd will be pricing the entry level FM2 stuff really agressively in Jan 2013 onwards, so you could probably pick up the A4-5300 for 30 euro.
,
WEI scores are: Processor: 6.3, Memory: 5.9, Graphics: 4.7, Gaming Graphics: 6.3, primary hard disk, 8.1.
Will test power consumption shortly, but just seeing the load on the CPU with excel, word, and chrome with 5 browser windows open, it hovers around 1- 4%, so meaning for these light usage cases, it might be cheaper to run than the intel options (that would be a real turn up for the books).
crimson117 - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
I'm having trouble parsing this sentence...> From my perspective, a storage system the RAID 5 that the A85X chipset supports across the eight SATA 6 Gbps ports is golden where Trinity is concerned.
KineticHummus - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
it means using trinity in a storage system/home server is great because it natively supports raid 5 across all 8 sata3 ports, which intel can not do.Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
Except that anyone running an 8-drive RAID5 with large, slow, consumer off the shelf SATA drives is either uninformed or a moron.Odds on getting an unrecoverable read error with large (1TB+) drives during a RAID5 rebuild are incredibly high; that's why enterprise SANs are using things like 450GB/600GB SAS drives now, and those have a failure rate an order of magnitude lower than consumer grade SATA.
Home servers should be using RAID1, 10, Z, Z2 - or just none at all. Whatever you use, doing proper backups (which RAID is not) is critical if you care about your data. DVDs I've ripped? I can get those again. Pictures of my son's first birthday? Backed up in triplicate, multiple offsite, and cloud stored.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops...
ven1ger - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
First of if you're calling someone a moron, maybe you should look in the mirror.The article that you linked was written back in 2007, and if you read some of the comments, many of the comments thought it was much ado about nothing.
Maybe you should check out what current cloud based backup companies look like, here's an example that I was just reading about a couple of days ago.
http://blog.backblaze.com/
Very interesting story, commercial cloud based storage company that uses consumer SATA drives. They even have open-sourced hardware design(s) available for their PODs that anyone can use to create their own muti-drive backup system, and which several others have created, if you are so inclined that way.
I am no way involved with Backblaze, just was an interesting story piece that I ran across and their tale of harvesting consumer grade 3TB SATA drives in the aftermath of the Thailand flooding.
Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
Ad hominem ignored.The article was correct then and even more now. As data density has increased, reliability has not kept pace.
Using BackBlaze, or most any "cloud backup provider" as a reference for pro-RAID-5 is a bad idea. Cloud storage providers create their redundancy at the system level. Reliability, availability, and operational efficiencies are all hugely increased by treating the entire system as an FRU. It's cheaper for them to just wait for there to be enough downed pods to justify "Okay, let's roll into the DC, pull out a dozen systems, and slap in new ones." They don't have the time or concern to troubleshoot individual drive failures.
(Also, BackBlaze uses RAID-6.)
So again, if you're using RAID-5 with big, slow, error-prone drives; please stop doing that if you care about your data.
Memristor - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
What version of the AHCI, RAID and USB 3.0 BIOS is on this new board? It would be very helpful if you could include the version of these BIOS's in your board reviews. Since it is very easy to updated the firmware of these components outside of a regular motherboard BIOS update it can be very helpful to increase performance and other issues that arise especially with RAID configurations and newer SSD drives.djshortsleeve - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Ian, glad you mentioned hysteresis. I dont understand why they dont incorporate this control? Its fairly simple as long as a target temperature is defined.goinginstyle - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
"This could be an error on the part of OCCT.." If you do not know what the problem is then why mention it in the review as a performance concern. Either OCCT is updated to work with Trinity or more than likely it is not but find out before you state it. As to DPC latency, is it really a EFI problem or a platform problem as Llano is not much better.Hardcore69 - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Why bother? An Ivy Bridge i3 is 55w and is close to the equivalent except for the GPU, less than a fart's difference CPU wise. Compared to a hot 100w CPU, if you don't game, this isn't worth bothering with. At all for a standard office box. As for the mobo, I'd prefer a gruntier CPU than fancy useless heatpipes.