FoxConn A7DA-S AMD 790GX mainboard review

[Guru3D News]

With the more high-end consumer in mind AMD released the new 790GX series mainboards. This mainboard is a lot about status as AMD want to re-establish their status and performance levels for their products...

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[vbetts]

Interesting...I hope this can help AMD out some.

[Nictron]

I quote from your review

"In 98% of today's games CPU cores wise whether you have 2, 3 or 4 CPU cores it will seriously not make a difference, as they will only utilize a maximum of two simultaneous cores. For that matter a faster dual-core processor will give you more performance than a slightly slower 3 or 4 core processor. Fear is rather GPU bound though. As you can see, virtually not a difference on any of the platforms."

HIlbert, I recently read an article where they took a 4870 X2 and benchmarked it with Quad, Dual Core Intel and AMD CPU's. ranging from 1.6Ghz underclocked to 3.6 Ghz overclocked.

In this it became apparent how big a difference a CPU can make, some games showed increases of 50 FPS @ 1920x1200.

I am telling you this because I wonder if you have the time to test this with your benchmark suite using the 4870X2 and the GTX 280.

This will show the difference a CPU makes when using Xrossfrire or SLI or a single card, you could possibly try and reach 4Ghz and see what impact it would have.

Thank you.

[Hilbert Hagedoorn]

Originally Posted by Nictron

HIlbert, I recently read an article where they took a 4870 X2 and benchmarked it with Quad, Dual Core Intel and AMD CPU's. ranging from 1.6Ghz underclocked to 3.6 Ghz overclocked.

In this it became apparent how big a difference a CPU can make, some games showed increases of 50 FPS @ 1920x1200.

Something like this ?:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/cpu-sc...re-processors/

Only in very extreme GPU bound situations, indeed like Quad SLI or CrossfireX with 3-4 GPUs, there will be a more CPU overhead inbetween the GPU driver and the CPU/Memory (and thus CPU dependancy). But really, that's in very extreme hardware situations. So only there it'll make a difference.

Even then you'd have way more benefit of a dual core that is faster clocked than a quad-core that is slower clocked. But bro I'm with you, I sincerely hope that we'll see better SMP / multi-threaded based applications for our games. But realistically with modern game titles and with a fairly high-end graphics card, it's just not the case as with a average Dual-core processor you'll yield roughly the same resutls as that same processor with 4 logical CPU cores.

Older game titles obviously will benefit from a faster CPU.

And to ask all regular users to overclock to 4 GHz ? No thanks. A Dual-core processor @ ~3 GHz is the price/performance sweet spot right now.

[Nictron]

Thank you, I missed that article.

From what I have seen high end quad cores make the biggest difference in Crossfire and SLi, for some reason it just enables the drivers to scale better.

4Ghz is a bit extreme, but hey I am running a Q8550 @ 3.4Ghz, and my two 8800 GTX's @ 627/998 24/7 water cooled.

Currently my system runs everything fine except for Crysis Ultra High settings, I think I will wait for the next generation graphics cards before I upgrade though.

Thank you for a great site by the way!

[Gameslove]

Hilbert Hagedoorn
Thanks for review! So, will work Radeon HD 3300 onboard + Radeon HD 3870 (and HD 3300 + HD 4850) - HydraVision? Or not?

[Hilbert Hagedoorn]

HydraVision ? absolutely.

But to make sure you are not confusing it, not hybrid mode though - thus have the two render in Crossfire. But Hydravision (multimonitor) should no no problem.

[vbetts]

I think when these come out as dual core(And hopefully at the same clocked frequencies, or range as the quad core BE phenoms), they would have more room to overclock.