Six Socket FM2 Motherboards For AMD's Trinity APUs

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Many thanks for a great review and one which I've been waiting for quite a while since the release of Trinity!

Once again it shows me that performance is pretty much identical between the boards, the only difference really being the overclockability and power consumption... the latter of which I value the most.

It would have been great if you could have included mATX and perhaps even some ITX boards in there - not sure how many people buy full (fat) ATX over mATX?

It would have also been beneficial to see some SATA performance testing.

 
[citation][nom]wislam[/nom]...It would have been great if you could have included mATX and perhaps even some ITX boards in there - not sure how many people buy full (fat) ATX over mATX?It would have also been beneficial to see some SATA performance testing.[/citation]
Yeah I'm with you on that mATX/ITX part of the comment. These are budget chips and when I built a system around the A8-3870K chip, I looked for the cheapest mATX board I could find. It just makes more sense for the platform.
 
I think based on the benchmark, MSI is the clear balance between price and performance. Its performance numbers nearly match ASUS while offering a price close to the ASROCKs. However in a test like this where in every category its dead even, its down to how cool the peripherals are. I think this is where MSI comes ahead. The Black SATA cables with White tips and full labeled I/O panel gives it an edge over the competition.
They also decided to make a more Stable system then one that tries to mask power consumption.
 
I really think four SATA cables should be the norm and you shouldn't penalize a board for not having more in the box. Even high-end enthusiast builds rarely use more than three drives.
 
I definitely agree on itx/matx. The situations where this CPU makes sense all could work with a smaller form factor. By extension, what I'd love to see is a large itx/matx roundup with undervolting/underclocking comparisons and GPU overclocks ESPECIALLY on the 65w TDP processors across the lineup; A4, A6 and A8 reviews with undervolting are impossible to find. With 2133mhz ram easily affordable, I don't know why Trinity is always benched with 1600.
 
these articles comparing same socket mobos get a little boring. 90% of the benchies are the same (as they would be). And the 10% is the difference in peripheral connectivity and some on-board features.
 
[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]these articles comparing same socket mobos get a little boring. 90% of the benchies are the same (as they would be). And the 10% is the difference in peripheral connectivity and some on-board features.[/citation]

They show a good comparison of boards for a given platform. Boring to you or not, they are often among the most useful articles on the site to the most people.
 
[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]They show a good comparison of boards for a given platform. Boring to you or not, they are often among the most useful articles on the site to the most people.[/citation]

from the number of comments, doesnt seem like many people are interested.

Or maybe its just that Trinity is meh for most , except you, who has been quoting the same techreport article on every AMD story for some time now. I know its personally painful to you, but AMD is doomed.
 
I would like to see an Intel IGPU (2500, 3000, 4000) system on the charts with these. This would show where they stand compared to AMD's setup. We know that if you add a dedicated GPU to an Intel system you will more than likely beat out some/most of AMD's offerings if you gaming.
 
[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]from the number of comments, doesnt seem like many people are interested.Or maybe its just that Trinity is meh for most , except you, who has been quoting the same techreport article on every AMD story for some time now. I know its personally painful to you, but AMD is doomed.[/citation]

Couldn't think of a good argument, so you went down to mockery and going off on a tangent that doesn't really correlate to your earlier post. That's real nice of you.

First off, I'll start by saying that you didn't specify FM2 as the socket in your earlier post, you specified same-socket round-ups and like I said, they're more important than comparing boards from different sockets because they give a clear comparison of some of the best options for a given platform. Changing your meaning to strictly FM2 changes nothing of that and using that as a personal attack against me only weakens your argument even more.

The number of comments here is irrelevant to the point that I made and what you said afterwards doesn't add to the discussion. The same is true for the number of readers regardless of whether or not they commented here.

It's not my fault that that Tech Report article is one of the only articles which measured performance properly. Furthermore, I've actually used it much more often to explain how an i3 is much better than a Pentium in real-world gaming performance than I have for arguments supporting AMD.

Whether or not I like AMD's current track is irrelevant to any point that I make about the performance except those that are explaining my opinion of it, which are far fewer than simply explaining the performance situation.

AMD being doomed should be personally painful to any and all computer enthusiasts because it could spell doom for much of the rest of the industry. We've already seen how Nvidia is willing to significantly cut corners and how Intel's improvements in performance have slowed almost to a halt and this is all with AMD around. I can't imagine the situation getting better without AMD. Without AMD, both would probably also be open to anti-trust and other such lawsuits, especially Intel, so even AMD's competitors may be screwed by AMD going under.

Trinity is generally the best CPU/GPU option for most entry-level gaming systems and is a great option for lower mid-ranged overclocking builds. Whether or not a site that is not mostly used by low-end gamers who read such articles as this has many comments on such an article doesn't entirely support your claims either because you've taken out the most important elements from your consideration, the human elements. You didn't consider the fact that most people who would use a Trinity system aren't prowling the articles and even better, many of the boards tested here aren't ideal for most Trinity users anyway because they're mostly too expensive.

I could go on, but it doesn't seem worth the effort.
 
[citation][nom]lunyone[/nom]I would like to see an Intel IGPU (2500, 3000, 4000) system on the charts with these. This would show where they stand compared to AMD's setup. We know that if you add a dedicated GPU to an Intel system you will more than likely beat out some/most of AMD's offerings if you gaming.[/citation]

Under ~$350, Trinity generally beats Intel in system build budget entry-level gaming systems in both gaming performance and general power consumption. Adding a discrete card increases price and that's not something that you have a lot of room for in the very low budgets. Intel's main advantage over AMD in gaming performance comes in with the cheapest i5s because otherwise, AMD is keeping up fairly well in stock gaming performance at a given price point, especially in many modern games with heavy multi-player usage that eats many threads (Metro 2033 and BF3 MP are two great examples).
 
Under ~$350, Trinity generally beats Intel in system build budget entry-level gaming systems in both gaming performance and general power consumption. Adding a discrete card increases price and that's not something that you have a lot of room for in the very low budgets. Intel's main advantage over AMD in gaming performance comes in with the cheapest i5s because otherwise, AMD is keeping up fairly well in stock gaming performance at a given price point, especially in many modern games with heavy multi-player usage that eats many threads (Metro 2033 and BF3 MP are two great examples).
Click to expand...
I know this, but by how much? It would be easy to add an Intel iGPU to the bottom of the chart, so those not informed too well can see what they would get if they bought just the Intel CPU/GPU (mainly for references sake).
 
[citation][nom]lunyone[/nom]I know this, but by how much? It would be easy to add an Intel iGPU to the bottom of the chart, so those not informed too well can see what they would get if they bought just the Intel CPU/GPU (mainly for references sake).[/citation]

Estimating here, but I'd say that the A10s with DDR3-1866 9-9-9-24 or thereabouts will be something like two to four times faster than Intel's HD 4000 in most situations. Suffice to say that the difference is huge even if you ignore Intel's crappy drivers. CPU performance of the i3s is a good deal higher in gaming, but can be met and even exceeded with overclocking. Sorry, but I'm not aware of any article (at least not one that is up to date with drivers and such for both companies) that directly compares them for a more specific and potentially more accurate comparison.

Thanks to a deal on a Radeon 6670 GDDR5, now and for a short time only, an Intel i3 build may be doable that truly bests Trinity at about $350 or less, but otherwise, Trinity wins by either huge margins at the same cost or comparable performance to somewhat higher price points with Intel. It's not a huge price advantage, only a few dozen dollars at the most, but it's something.
 
[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]15 months ago:http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,3008.html[/citation]

I only see A75 boards there. I'm not particularly interested in A55 boards, but do you have a review of them since butremor seems interested?

Also, thanks for the link. Any chance of a more up to date version being done with some of those boards and/or with any newer boards that have come out since then?

EDIT: Also, considering this A85X review, would you mind if I asked at what price would you consider going A75 over a more expensive A85X board? Much of their feature sets seem to overlap so much that I'm not sure of where it really matters or if it's even worth getting an A85 board over a cheaper A75 board. Honestly, I'm mostly leaning towards A75 strictly because of price, but I'd appreciate other opinions to compare against and see if I'm missing anything.
 
[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]at what price would you consider going A75 over a more expensive A85X board?[/citation]Chris would be a better person to ask, as I recall FM1 CPUs were barely adequate for impoverished enthusiasts by 2011 standards, and FM2 CPUs are barely adequate for those same buyers today.
 
I have the A8-3870K on an A75 board. It's clocked at 3.4ghz with 1600mhz cas 9 ram. Just reporting on the feel of it from the cpu-side, my old C2Q6600 at any speed feels snappier. It doesn't 'feel' like a quadcore at all, 2 at best, but usually feels a lot more like the really old mobile Athlon 64 4000+ in my 7 yr old laptop a lot of times. That's all cpu-specific stuff and 'feelings'. Gaming is just fine... like dirt 3, 1080p, 2x aa, medium settings and pumping out 30+ fps (dirt 3 is a weak example, i know).
 
There's another thing we need to consider with Trinity. Resonant Clock Mesh appears to work optimally at about 3.3GHz and drops off a little towards approx. 4GHz... but is pretty ineffective at 2.3-2.5GHz, which, ironically, is where the top mobile Trinity sits.

I know that SA concluded that the A10-4600M is two-thirds the performance of the 5800K at one-third of the power, but I'm left wondering that maybe if RCM performs better the higher you go (to a point), perhaps, AMD could've clocked the A10-4600M a bit higher for essentially free performance.

In a rather long winded way, I would be very interested in seeing how an A10-5800K performs and how much it consumes if you were to downclock it in say, 200MHz steps. I've seen Hexus' review of the A10-5700 and the fact that it performs closely to the 5800K yet significantly undercuts even the A8-5600K as regards power consumption, so I'm wondering how much of this is down to the RCM and how much is down to simply having a better chip than the 5800K.
 
Very interesting indeed... Would you suggest Don to reconsider the "Best CPU's of the Month" recommendations then? I mean, if the number of threads that a CPU can take simultaneously has such a big contribution, then anything below the Core i3 and FX-4170 recommendations may need to be reevaluated.

Don't mean to sound like a Nazi, but isn't trolling a punishable act here?

 
[citation][nom]clonazepam[/nom]I have the A8-3870K on an A75 board. It's clocked at 3.4ghz with 1600mhz cas 9 ram. Just reporting on the feel of it from the cpu-side, my old C2Q6600 at any speed feels snappier. It doesn't 'feel' like a quadcore at all, 2 at best, but usually feels a lot more like the really old mobile Athlon 64 4000+ in my 7 yr old laptop a lot of times. That's all cpu-specific stuff and 'feelings'. Gaming is just fine... like dirt 3, 1080p, 2x aa, medium settings and pumping out 30+ fps (dirt 3 is a weak example, i know).[/citation]

It feels different, if for any reason at all, because it is a slower per core CPU than the Q6600 by a little and despite higher memory bandwidth, it shares it's memory bandwidth with a GPU. That doesn't make it any less of a quad core CPU whatsoever.
 
[citation][nom]bigcyco1[/nom]It is but you half to be able to prove it's trolling.Report it to a mod and they will decide if your that upset over it.[/citation]

I'm not really upset by it, but it's easily proven to be trolling by his/her response to me.
 
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