Testing methodology
Comparison systems |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Motherboard | Sapphire PP A85XT | ASRock FM2A75 Pro4-M | Gigabyte F2-A85X-UP4 | ASRock A75M-ITX | |||
| Motherboard BIOS | 0.46 | 1.70 | F3G | 1.60 | |||
| Chipset driver | AMD Catalyst 12.8 SB | ||||||
| Processor | AMD A10-5800K | AMD A8-3870K | |||||
| Memory | Patriot IEM 8GB (2x4GB) | ||||||
| Memory timings | 9-9-9-24-1T @ 1,600MHz | ||||||
| Graphics | AMD HD 7660D (onboard) | AMD HD 6550D (onboard) | |||||
| Graphics driver | AMD Catalyst 12.8 | ||||||
| Disk drive | Samsung 830 Series 256GB SSD | ||||||
| Chassis | Corsair Graphite 600T | ||||||
| Power supply | Corsair AX750 | ||||||
| Operating system | Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit | ||||||
CPU and memory benchmarks |
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| HEXUS.PiFast |
Our number-crunching benchmark stresses a single core by calculating Pi to 10m places | ||||||
| PCMark 7 |
An all-encompassing test to evaluate system performance | ||||||
| X264 HD v5.01 | All-core video-transcoding test. Second pass noted | ||||||
| CINEBENCH 11.5 | Using Cinebench's multi-CPU render, this cross-platform benchmark stresses all cores | ||||||
GPU benchmarks |
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| 3DMark 11 | DX11, run with the entry preset | ||||||
| 3DMark Vantage | DX10, run at the default performance preset | ||||||
| DiRT Showdown | DX9, 1,280x720 medium-quality settings | ||||||
| Batman: Arkham City | DX9, 1,280x720, high-quality settings | ||||||
General benchmarks |
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| Storage performance | USB 3.0 read and write speed, SSD average read and write speed | ||||||
| Power consumption | While idling and when running X264 HD and Batman: Arkham City | ||||||
Notes
We've got the Sapphire board up against another full-ATX A85X board in the form of the Gigabyte 'UP4. Putting the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons is the £50 ASRock A75 Pro4-M, based on the 'lesser' A75 chipset. We've also added in numbers from an ASRock Mini-ITX board running the last-generation A8-3870K APU. The purpose here is to evaluate, as a platform, the advances made by AMD and its partners over the last year or so.
