AMD A85X Mobo Roundup: ASRock, Gigabyte, Asus

Test Setup and Configuration Specifications & Features

• Case: Highspeed PC Top Deck Tech Station
• CPU: AMD A10-5800K
• Cooler: CM Hyper 212 Evo
• RAM: 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3/1600 CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9B
• PSU: Silverstone Strider SST-ST75F
• SSD: 120GB Corsair Force GT
• OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective UEFI menus and set each board to its default settings, making sure that the CPU and GPU were set to their stock values, and set the memory speed to DDR3/1600. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows 7 Home Premium x64 was installed via a thumb drive. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software and ran the tests.

Futuremark PCMark 7 General Application and Multimedia Performance

Futuremark's PCMark 7 is the latest version of the PCMark whole-system benchmarking suite. It has updated application performance measurements targeted for a Windows 7 environment and uses newer metrics to gauge relative performance, versus the older PCMark Vantage.

Below is what Futuremark says is incorporated in the base PCMark suite and the Entertainment, Creativity, and Productivity suites, the four modules we have benchmark scores for you here.

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 Creativity test contains a collection of workloads to measure the system performance in typical creativity scenarios. Individual tests include viewing, editing, transcoding and storing photos and videos. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given a Creativity test score.

The Productivity test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance in typical productivity scenarios. Individual workloads include loading web pages and using home office applications. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given a Productivity test score.

As we'd expect, there's not much variation between the scores on each motherboard, although the Gigabyte board did score slightly lower than the other two boards. Nothing too surprising here.