ASUS A88X-Pro Review: Kaveri, Kaveri, Quite Contrary
by Ian Cutress on April 22, 2014 11:59 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- AMD
- Asus
- Kaveri
F1 2013
First up is F1 2013 by Codemasters. I am a big Formula 1 fan in my spare time, and nothing makes me happier than carving up the field in a Caterham, waving to the Red Bulls as I drive by (because I play on easy and take shortcuts). F1 2013 uses the EGO Engine, and like other Codemasters games ends up being very playable on old hardware quite easily. In order to beef up the benchmark a bit, we devised the following scenario for the benchmark mode: one lap of Spa-Francorchamps in the heavy wet, the benchmark follows Jenson Button in the McLaren who starts on the grid in 22nd place, with the field made up of 11 Williams cars, 5 Marussia and 5 Caterham in that order. This puts emphasis on the CPU to handle the AI in the wet, and allows for a good amount of overtaking during the automated benchmark. We test at 1920x1080 on Ultra graphical settings.
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Bioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite was Zero Punctuation’s Game of the Year for 2013, uses the Unreal Engine 3, and is designed to scale with both cores and graphical prowess. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
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Tomb Raider
The next benchmark in our test is Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider is an AMD optimized game, lauded for its use of TressFX creating dynamic hair to increase the immersion in game. Tomb Raider uses a modified version of the Crystal Engine, and enjoys raw horsepower. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
| Tomb Raider, 1080p Max | ||
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34 Comments
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Antronman - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
It's Asus.Of course it's going to be recommended.
Every fool knows Asus is #1
yannigr - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
And those who are not fools? What do they think about ASUS? :PHanzNFranzen - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
lol!! =)Yorgos - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
I am really happy with asrock extreme6+, which packs more features+1 64 Mbit Flash ROM (awesome feature)
+1 HDMI (4 monitors in total)
-1 eSata (instead of 2 on the asus)
-2 usb2.0
+1 Sata
+ power and reset buttons (f* great feature)
+ doesn't make you look like a pimp with gold teeth
+Wake on LAN
+ cheaper for around 20 € in my country than the asus
In my opinion you CANNOT beat those feature with a better price and better benchmarks.
That's why I never read the conclusions, If I wanted an opinion I could ask also my dog, both of them have the same value.
Alexvrb - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
What about PWM (4-pin) fan headers? If I was in the market for this kind of board, this A88X Pro would be the one I'd get, just because of its abundance of 4-pin connectors (5 of them). Most ATX A88X boards have... 3? With maybe one or two 3-pins to go with them. Yeah, you can get splitters (better get well-made ones) but then you can only monitor the speed of one of the connected fans per motherboard header.Antronman - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
Yeah.And it's ASUS quality.
Alexvrb - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
Which, most of the time, means it's good. I've been burned over the years by most of the major manufacturers at least once, including Asus. Sometimes it's a hardware/design issue, sometimes it's software/firmware. On occasion it was a problem with the chipset itself, and not entirely the manufacturers fault. About the most solid boards I used were by Epox, hilariously enough.But yes, overall I'd consider Asus to generally produce good boards, particularly if you're buying one of their "premium" models.
tuklap - Friday, April 25, 2014 - link
I just hope Asrock placed anti surge ic's and esd protections :(just4U - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
In my opinion none of this matters until they finally release the A8- 7X series processors. Don't know about the rest of you but I've been eyeing it for multiple builds simply because of it's price/performance ratio. I'd expected it to be release already.HiTechObsessed - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
My problem with these APUs is something like the A10-7850k costs $180, or you can get the 750k for $80, and a 7770 GHz for $100 and blow the 7850k out of the water in performance. APUs don't make sense on large boards like this when you can pair the same CPU up with a dedicated GPU and get much more gaming power.