![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , July 27, 2010
- Author:
- Morry Teitelman
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI 890FXA-GD70 Motherboard Review
MSI's newest offering supporting AMD's line of processors comes in the form of the 890FXA-GD70. This board could potentially be a P55 killer, with its balance of features and performance prowess. How does it do in the HardOCP gauntlet and better yet, how well does it overclock?
Multimedia Benchmarks
Outside of gaming and encoding, there are few applications on the desktop that will push our systems to their limits, this especially becomes apparent when we start talking about multi-core processors that are now the norm. Some multi-thread aware encoding and editor applications are starting to reach into all available threads and truly utilize the processing power of these multi-core CPUs.
The benchmarks below all represent very real world situations just like you would run into at home while encoding video from your camcorder - or while using a picture or video editing program - or while encoding music for your iPod - or encoding a DVD for saving it to your hard drive to allow you easier access to the content. Also we have included WinRAR, a very popular zipping used by many when sending files or posting for download.
We have simply timed our various tests on the different systems and supplied you with the amount of time it took for the system to fully build the file. Scratch disks were used properly as well as making sure we were not bumping into any IO bottlenecks elsewhere.
Graphs are labeled as follows: Motherboard - CPU Type & Clock Speed - Memory Speed
DivX Converter 7.0
The 890FXA-GD70 easily matches performance with the AMD and Intel P55 based board, in this intensive conversion test.
LAME 3.98.1
Yet again, we see the 890FXA-GD70's performance eclipsing that of the other AMD board and coming within range of the Intel X58 based system.
WinRAR v3.90 B1
While the 890FXA-GD70 falls slightly behind the Intel based systems in this memory intensive benchmark, it does manage to match performance with the other AMD based system.
Videora IPod Converter v4.02
We again see the 890FXA-GD70 unleashing on the competition, easily matching the performance of the AMD and the Intel X58 based boards.
TMPGEnc 4.0 XPRESS v4.6.2.266
Closing out the multimedia tests on with solid performance, the 890FXA-GD70 manages to beat out the competing AMD and Intel P55 based solutions by a slim margin.
Do keep in mind the AMD system is using a 6-core processor while the Intel P55 boards are a 4-core/8-thread system.