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now I often have people asking me about what's the best gaming motherboard or

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what's the best platform for gaming or whatever the case may be what I usually

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say to them is the best gaming motherboard is the motherboard that has

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all the features you want and fits all the hardware you want to put on it but

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just to demonstrate I thought I'd take a couple of gaming motherboards and pit

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them against each other this is going to be a bit of an examination of the 990 FX

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chipset versus the 890 FX chipset so

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right here what I have in my hand is a Crosshair 4 formula you're going to want

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to come a little closer so I can show you this for it as well um and the

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Crosshair 4 formula is an 890fx board

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it's got support for USB 3 via the back panel it's got an am3 socket dual

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Channel DDR3 up to four PCI e6x slots

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although you're running at uh 16x and

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16x or it's 16x

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884 something along those lines yeah I think that's the uh the deal we've also

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got SATA 2 okay so the 89 uh the 990 FX

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version the Crosshair 5 formula has a bit of a sharper aesthetic all these

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SATA ports are changed over to SATA 3 6 GB per second now we also have an

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additional USB 3 front header to go with

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the 1 2 3 four USB 3 back headers okay

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it is an am3 plus socket which means that we'll have support for AMD's

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bulldozer 8 core CPUs when they are released so

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basically what is that mean in terms of its performance with a current

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generation processor so I thought I'd take some of the benchmarks I did before

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this is this is with a 6990 dual Graphics uh video card or dual chip

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video card we've got 8 gigs of RAM uh my usual test bench and so I thought I'd

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take my 1100t benchmarks with the 890 FX platform and run them against the 99 DFX

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to see how it goes so I'm almost done and I'll show you guys the results when

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I'm done and I think that if you have been following how much of an impact

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chipsets have on computer performance these days you probably won't find these

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results very surprising all right so here's my

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results with the 890 FX versus the 990fx

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chipset so I'm going to leave off crisis 2 for now we're going to return to that

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but let's look at the Witcher so uh yeah performs about 8% better Dirt 3 the 990

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FX is a little slower Fear 3 they're

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identical um Battlefield Bad Company 2 the 990 FX is a little faster and Civ 5

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it's a little faster so it seems to me the board is slightly faster for gaming

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although I can't really say with certainty that these are

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significantly um different enough to to be representative of the performance

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Delta because I didn't do a ton of runs I've had a lot of benchmarking to do

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this weekend so this is pretty much within the margin of error for most of

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them although Witcher two I have very good consistency on that Benchmark I

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would say that one's definitely out ahead and Civ 5 is just a late game view

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so that one is definitely ahead and there were they were distinctly

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different frame rates it's 30 constant 31 constant so there's uh not much uh

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room for error there um Dirt 3 is a

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canned Benchmark so once again although it's a caned Benchmark with AI so it

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runs a race and sometimes the the AI player places differently so depending

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on how many cars are in front of it at a time it could be slightly more or less

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demanding now crisis 2 this is a funny one because I'm going to have to go go

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back at this because crisis 2 I ran it with the uh when I was originally doing

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um this one with the Apu versus the 1100t I ran it with dual 69 70s and uh I

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was getting zero scaling on this platform so I was like okay forget it so

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that's when I switched to the 6990 for my standardized benchmarking platform

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now I got reasonable scaling with the 6990 so I was like oh okay well I mean

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it didn't scale great it went from like 40 to 49 FPS and then it you know this

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was appropriate given this but then all of a sudden I I mean I reran this again

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and I got the same result so for some reason this platform performed way

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better in crisis 2 so what I'm going to do is I'm going to throw the Crosshair 4

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back on the test bench and I'm going to run crisis 2 again and see what happened

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because I'm not even reinstalling I'm not even changing any drivers I'm

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changing absolutely nothing about my Windows platform in order to switch

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between between 990 and 890 FX because they're actually very very very similar

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chipsets there's almost no difference between them so let's see what happens here guys well every once in a while you

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run into these bizarre things I I just did my run through again and if nothing

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else there it is 49.1 this uh reassures me that my crisis

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2 run through is fairly um consistent so

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49.1 is my new result so yeah you see

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this kind of thing from time to time where a particular setup is a little bit

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faster in you know something than another one even though they should be

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very similar so the 990 FX Crosshair 5

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formula seems to perform better in crisis 2 with the 6990 than the

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Crosshair 4 formula I suspect it's just a quirk of my particular setup like I

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remember I had uh one of my old computers it was uh like a 939 socket

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939 computer for some reason never required a password for Warcraft 3 I

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never never had to uh enter a CD key or

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rather not I never had to I never had to enter the

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CD so uh it would run with a with a no CD even back before that game would do

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it and uh you know I the computer I had

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before that wouldn't do it and the computer I upgraded to afterwards wouldn't do it and it was just sort of a

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quirk of that particular platform so there you go so those are my results for

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the 890 FX versus the 990 FX I would pretty much call this probably some kind

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of a weird glitch but the funny thing is this is like significantly more playable

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on this platform than like this is a crappy 50 FPS and this is a good 60 you

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can really feel it um in those drops so

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thank you for checking out my video on the Crosshair 5 formula versus the

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Crosshair 4 formula 990 FX 890 FX don't

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forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips from more unboxings reviews and other computer videos and oh yeah here's that

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uh black socket indicating am3 plus

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compatibility very cool

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stuff okay this is driving me crazy I'm going to do it one more time so I put

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the CR the Crosshair 5 back on the bench

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I'm firing up crisis 2 again oh guess I'll have to restart before I do that

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and then uh yeah I'm changing absolutely zero game settings I checked GPU Z it's

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running at 16x in this slot all that stuff so let's see what happens let's

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see if I can reproduce these results

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again well I figured it out here's my result with the 990fx so

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508 so I can throw this guy out because

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here's what happened the 990 FX board is

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set to the wrong date in the BIOS which

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caused my fraps uh results to be out of order

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because I sort it by date modified in order to to make it simple for me to see

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which is the last Benchmark I Ran So the True

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Result um and it must have been my imagination that it was running smoother

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on here the True Result is around 50 FPS and performance is equivalent thank you

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for your patience while I sorted out this little technical matter and I guess

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thanks for coming along on the ride don't forget to subscribe to lus techtips for more unboxings reviews and

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other computer videos