now I often have people asking me about what's the best gaming motherboard or
what's the best platform for gaming or whatever the case may be what I usually
say to them is the best gaming motherboard is the motherboard that has
all the features you want and fits all the hardware you want to put on it but
just to demonstrate I thought I'd take a couple of gaming motherboards and pit
them against each other this is going to be a bit of an examination of the 990 FX
chipset versus the 890 FX chipset so
right here what I have in my hand is a Crosshair 4 formula you're going to want
to come a little closer so I can show you this for it as well um and the
Crosshair 4 formula is an 890fx board
it's got support for USB 3 via the back panel it's got an am3 socket dual
Channel DDR3 up to four PCI e6x slots
although you're running at uh 16x and
16x or it's 16x
884 something along those lines yeah I think that's the uh the deal we've also
got SATA 2 okay so the 89 uh the 990 FX
version the Crosshair 5 formula has a bit of a sharper aesthetic all these
SATA ports are changed over to SATA 3 6 GB per second now we also have an
additional USB 3 front header to go with
the 1 2 3 four USB 3 back headers okay
it is an am3 plus socket which means that we'll have support for AMD's
bulldozer 8 core CPUs when they are released so
basically what is that mean in terms of its performance with a current
generation processor so I thought I'd take some of the benchmarks I did before
this is this is with a 6990 dual Graphics uh video card or dual chip
video card we've got 8 gigs of RAM uh my usual test bench and so I thought I'd
take my 1100t benchmarks with the 890 FX platform and run them against the 99 DFX
to see how it goes so I'm almost done and I'll show you guys the results when
I'm done and I think that if you have been following how much of an impact
chipsets have on computer performance these days you probably won't find these
results very surprising all right so here's my
results with the 890 FX versus the 990fx
chipset so I'm going to leave off crisis 2 for now we're going to return to that
but let's look at the Witcher so uh yeah performs about 8% better Dirt 3 the 990
FX is a little slower Fear 3 they're
identical um Battlefield Bad Company 2 the 990 FX is a little faster and Civ 5
it's a little faster so it seems to me the board is slightly faster for gaming
although I can't really say with certainty that these are
significantly um different enough to to be representative of the performance
Delta because I didn't do a ton of runs I've had a lot of benchmarking to do
this weekend so this is pretty much within the margin of error for most of
them although Witcher two I have very good consistency on that Benchmark I
would say that one's definitely out ahead and Civ 5 is just a late game view
so that one is definitely ahead and there were they were distinctly
different frame rates it's 30 constant 31 constant so there's uh not much uh
room for error there um Dirt 3 is a
canned Benchmark so once again although it's a caned Benchmark with AI so it
runs a race and sometimes the the AI player places differently so depending
on how many cars are in front of it at a time it could be slightly more or less
demanding now crisis 2 this is a funny one because I'm going to have to go go
back at this because crisis 2 I ran it with the uh when I was originally doing
um this one with the Apu versus the 1100t I ran it with dual 69 70s and uh I
was getting zero scaling on this platform so I was like okay forget it so
that's when I switched to the 6990 for my standardized benchmarking platform
now I got reasonable scaling with the 6990 so I was like oh okay well I mean
it didn't scale great it went from like 40 to 49 FPS and then it you know this
was appropriate given this but then all of a sudden I I mean I reran this again
and I got the same result so for some reason this platform performed way
better in crisis 2 so what I'm going to do is I'm going to throw the Crosshair 4
back on the test bench and I'm going to run crisis 2 again and see what happened
because I'm not even reinstalling I'm not even changing any drivers I'm
changing absolutely nothing about my Windows platform in order to switch
between between 990 and 890 FX because they're actually very very very similar
chipsets there's almost no difference between them so let's see what happens here guys well every once in a while you
run into these bizarre things I I just did my run through again and if nothing
else there it is 49.1 this uh reassures me that my crisis
2 run through is fairly um consistent so
49.1 is my new result so yeah you see
this kind of thing from time to time where a particular setup is a little bit
faster in you know something than another one even though they should be
very similar so the 990 FX Crosshair 5
formula seems to perform better in crisis 2 with the 6990 than the
Crosshair 4 formula I suspect it's just a quirk of my particular setup like I
remember I had uh one of my old computers it was uh like a 939 socket
939 computer for some reason never required a password for Warcraft 3 I
never never had to uh enter a CD key or
rather not I never had to I never had to enter the
CD so uh it would run with a with a no CD even back before that game would do
it and uh you know I the computer I had
before that wouldn't do it and the computer I upgraded to afterwards wouldn't do it and it was just sort of a
quirk of that particular platform so there you go so those are my results for
the 890 FX versus the 990 FX I would pretty much call this probably some kind
of a weird glitch but the funny thing is this is like significantly more playable
on this platform than like this is a crappy 50 FPS and this is a good 60 you
can really feel it um in those drops so
thank you for checking out my video on the Crosshair 5 formula versus the
Crosshair 4 formula 990 FX 890 FX don't
forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips from more unboxings reviews and other computer videos and oh yeah here's that
uh black socket indicating am3 plus
compatibility very cool
stuff okay this is driving me crazy I'm going to do it one more time so I put
the CR the Crosshair 5 back on the bench
I'm firing up crisis 2 again oh guess I'll have to restart before I do that
and then uh yeah I'm changing absolutely zero game settings I checked GPU Z it's
running at 16x in this slot all that stuff so let's see what happens let's
see if I can reproduce these results
again well I figured it out here's my result with the 990fx so
508 so I can throw this guy out because
here's what happened the 990 FX board is
set to the wrong date in the BIOS which
caused my fraps uh results to be out of order
because I sort it by date modified in order to to make it simple for me to see
which is the last Benchmark I Ran So the True
Result um and it must have been my imagination that it was running smoother
on here the True Result is around 50 FPS and performance is equivalent thank you
for your patience while I sorted out this little technical matter and I guess
thanks for coming along on the ride don't forget to subscribe to lus techtips for more unboxings reviews and
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