| MSI 990FXA-GD80 AM3+ Motherboard |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Motherboards | |
| Written by David Ramsey | |
| Wednesday, 19 October 2011 | |
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Page 8 of 17
PCMark Vantage TestsPCMark Vantage is an objective hardware performance benchmark tool for PCs running 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7. It's well suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows Vista/7 PC: from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops, to dedicated workstations and high-end gaming rigs. Benchmark Reviews has decided to use a few select tests from the suite to simulate real-world processor usage in this article. Our tests were conducted on 64-bit Windows 7, with results displayed in the chart below. TV and Movies Suite
Gaming Suite*
Music Suite
* EDITOR'S NOTE: Hopefully our readers will carefully consider how relevant PCMark Vantage is as a "real-world" benchmark, since many of the tests rely on unrelated hardware components. For example, per the FutureMark PCMark Vantage White Paper document, Gaming test #2 weighs the storage device for 100% of the test score. In fact, according to PCMark Vantage the video card only impacts 23% of the total gaming score, but the CPU represents 37% of the final score. As our tests in this article (and many others) have already proven, gaming performance has a lot more to do with the GPU than the CPU, and especially more than the hard drive or SSD (which is worth 38% of the final gaming performance score). 
The TV and Movies suite concentrates on video playback and transcoding, but only uses two threads at a maximum, so the extra cores of the AMD processors shouldn't be an advantage, and as we can see from the results, they're not. The Gaming benchmark relies on the hard disk and video card for over 50% of its score (see the Editor's Note above), and we're using the same HDD and video card for all platforms, so the Intel processor's decisive win in this test simply means that Vantage's gaming code is more optimized for Intel processors. Bear in mind, however, that most "real world" games will not show this difference; generally, in games, your video card matters most, followed by the clock speed (not number of cores) of your processor. The PCMark Vantage gaming test can use up to 16 threads, so it's very strange that the eight core FX-8150 turns in markedly lower scores than the six core 1100T. Unlike the Gaming test, the Music test results have more real-world relevance, since multi-threading is much more common in music transcoding applications than it is in games. Even so, the four core Intel CPU beats the six and eight core AMD processors. In every one of these tests, the MSI board is slower than the ASUS board, albeit only by very small amounts.
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Comments
Hmm. Does this board do that much better? Perhaps the higher end MSI boards are worth taking a look at.
Tell that to RTS/MMO gamers!
I find all this Military spec rubbish fairly annoying, can see that it has at least an element of truth behind it, but it's still grade A marketing bollocks.
I was one of 'them' who rolled the dice and invested in the BD platform a few months ago with a 990-UD7 and have a tin can of 8150 myself. I am hearing the "no BIOS" howl from the owners of the supposedly backwards compatible 890 crowd. are you suspecting as I am that the same power stability you ran into here is what the holdup is with the 890 chipset boards? One of the stated differences between the 990's and the 890's is supposedly a beefier VRM. and they need it...I think the lights on my block dim when I load it up.
I turned the processor up to 3700 mhz and the vid card to 835 mhz and it now runs around 83F under normal load and rarely goes over 101F when I game. I run the vid card @ 840 mhz when gaming.
That seems to be the sweet spot for this setup. Cool and quiet.
Thanks for your time!