CPU Tests
Asus tends to hit exactly 5.0GHz under Intel ABT; ASRock's BIOS goes a bit higher, to 5.05-5.1GHz, hence the higher all-core score in Cinebench R23.
Okay, what is going on here? This is not a typo. After investigation, it turns out that ASRock's BIOS does funny things when an AVX workload is detected. Even though the BIOS says AVX workloads run at up to 5.3GHz, what actually happens is that all-core frequency plummets to around 4.1GHz.
We know this by logging the frequency when running the Blender benchmark. The same thing happens when running Prime95 with AVX active, but not when it is manually disabled by us, so it's a deliberate choice from ASRock. After reaching out, we got this response from the engineering team:
'For AVX1/AVX2/AVX512 programs, they will bring very huge heat and power, therefore, we made some steps to protect MB’s power phase. The situation you have is the protection of ABT. When running programs with AVX1/AVX2/AVX512, we suggest to load bios default.'
Interesting.
