AMD 990FX Mobo Round-Up: Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte

Name: AMD 990FX Motherboard Round-Up
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, August 24, 2011, 10:00 AM EDT

Futuremark PCMark 7

Futuremark's PCMark 7 is the latest version of the PCMark suite, recently released this spring. It has updated application performance measurements targeted for a Windows 7 environment. Here's what Futuremark says is incorporated in the base PCMark suite and the Entertainment suite, the two modules we have benchmark scores for you here.

Futuremark PCMark 7

General Application and Multimedia Performance

The PCMark test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance during typical desktop usage. This is the most important test since it returns the official PCMark score for the system
Storage

Windows Defender

Importing pictures

Gaming

Video Playback and transcoding
Graphics

DirectX 9

Image manipulation
Web browsing and decrypting

The Entertainment test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance in entertainment scenarios using mostly application workloads. Individual tests include recording, viewing, streaming and transcoding TV shows and movies, importing, organizing and browsing new music and several gaming related workloads. If the target system is not capable of running DirectX 10 workloads then those tests are skipped. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given an Entertainment test score.

The two PCMark7 tests we ran show the 990FX boards all running within a couple of percentage points of one another. However, they were all every so slighty faster then the older 890FX-based MSI board we've included for reference. The only explanations for the 990FX's advantage are software differences between the platforms and perhaps better tuned firmwares on the newer boards, because the underlying silicon is the same.