Asus Crosshair IV Extreme AMD 890FX Motherboard
Cinebench 10 & 11
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Cinebench R10 has since been superseded by the 11.5 version but we've continued to include it with a nod to backwards continuity. One of the hallmarks of CB11.5, however, is that it makes much more efficient use of more than four cores.
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Cinebench 11.5 is the latest update to Maxon's 3D rendering benchmark suite and the third major iteration of the Cinebench series. As with R10, CB11.5 includes a single-threaded, multi-threaded, and OpenGL test. We've focused on the first two tests as part of our processor comparison; the OpenGL test is a GPU-specific benchmark and is meant to represent professional graphics performance. Scores between the two benchmarks are not directly comparable, although it is possible to render R10's workload using 11.5, should you feel inclined. |
Eyeball the results above and you'll note a persistent gap between the M3A785-T and the Asus Crosshair IV Extreme—a gap that refused to go away, despite multiple test runs. Since Cinebench is processor-centric by design, it was odd to see a performance difference here as opposed to a program that's more memory speed dependent.
After a little sleuthing we found the problem. The M3A78-T fully supports AMD's latest Thuban, but some aspect of the motherboard's support for Cool'n'Quiet doesn't seem to be working properly. Specifically, the CPU wasn't always holding to its stock operating speed of 3.3GHz. The individual cores were automatically cycling down to lower speeds as if they weren't in use, thereby slowing the overall rendering time.
We were able to correct this by using AMD OverDrive to manually set and lock all six cores to 3.3GHz. Once we did so, performance equalized between the two motherboards.
