Gadgetory

now I often have people asking me about what's the best gaming motherboard or what's the best platform for gaming or whatever the case may be what I usually say to them is the best gaming motherboard is the motherboard that has all the features you want and fits all the hardware you want to put on it but just to demonstrate I thought I'd take a couple of gaming motherboards and pit them against each other this is going to be a bit of an examination of the 990 FX chipset versus the 890 FX chipset so right here what I have in my hand is a crosshair for formula you're gonna want to come a little closer so I can show you this part as well and the crosshair for formula is an 890 FX board it's got support for USB 3 via the back panel it's got an am-3 socket dual channel ddr3 up to 4 PCIe 16x slots although you're running at 16 X is 16 X or at 16 X 8 8 for something along those lines yep I think that's the deal we've also got SATA 2 okay so the eight nine the nine ninety F X version they crosshair v formula has a bit of a sharper aesthetic all these SATA ports are changed over to SATA 3 6 gigabit per second now we also have an additional USB 3 front header to go with the 154 USB 3 back headers ok there's an am3+ socket which means that left support for in these bulldozer 8 core CPUs when they are released so basically what does that mean in terms of its performance with a current generation processor so I thought I'd take some of the benchmarks I did before this is it this is what the 6990 dual graphics video card or dual chip video card you've got 8 gigs of RAM my usual test bench and so I thought I'd take my 1100 key benchmarks with the 890 FX platform and run them against the 990 FX to see how it goes so I'm almost done and I'll show you guys the results when I'm done and I think that if you have been following how much of an impact chipsets have on computer performance these days you probably won't find these results very surprising alright so here's my results with the 890 FX versus the 990 next chipset so I'm gonna leave off Crysis 2 for now we're gonna return to that but let's look at the Witcher so yeah performs about eight percent better dirt three the 99 dfx is a little slower fear 3 they're identical Battlefield Bad Company 2 the 990 FX is a little faster instead of 5 it's a little faster so it seems to me the board is slightly faster for gaming although I can't really say with certainty that these are significantly different enough to to be representative of the performance Delta because I didn't do a ton of runs I've had a lot of benchmarking to do this weekend so this is pretty much within the margin of error for most of them although which are - I have very good consistency on that benchmark I would say that one's definitely out ahead and sieve 5 is just a late-game view so that one is definitely ahead and there were they were distinctly different frame rates as 30 constant 31 constants so there's a not much room for error there note 3 is a can benchmark so once again although it's a can benchmark with AI so it runs a race and sometimes the the AI player places differently so depending on how many cars are in front of it at a time it could be slightly more or less demanding now Crysis 2 this is a funny one because I'm gonna have to go go back at this because Crysis 2 I ran it with the when I was originally doing this one with the APU versus the 1100 t I ran it with dual 69 70s and I was getting zero scaling on this platform so I was like okay forget it so that's when I switched to the 6990 for my standardized benchmarking platform now I got reasonable scaling with the 690 so I was like okay well I mean it didn't scale great it went from like 40 to 49 fps and then it you know this was appropriate given this but then all of a sudden I mean I reran this again and I got the same results so for some reason this platform performed way better in Crysis 2 so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna throw the crosshair 4 back on the test bench and I'm gonna run Crysis 2 again see what happened because I'm not even reinstalling I'm not even changing any drivers and changing absolutely nothing about my Windows platform in order to switch between 998 the effects because there are actually very very very similar chipsets there's almost no difference between them so let's see what happens here guys well every once in a while you run into these bizarre things I just did my run-through again and if nothing else there it is forty-nine point one this reassures me that my crisis to run through is fairly consistent so forty-nine point one is my new result so yeah you see this kind of thing from time to time where a particular setup is a little bit faster in you know something then another one even though they should be very similar so the 990 FX crosshair 5 formula seems to perform better in Crysis 2 with the 6990 than the crosshair for formula i suspect it's just a quirk of my particular setup like i remember i had one of my old computers it was like a 939 socket 939 computer for some reason never required a password for Warcraft 3 I never had to enter a CD key alright I rather not never had then I never had to enter the CD so it would run with uh with an OCD even back before that game would do it and you know I the computer I had before that wouldn't do it and the computer I upgraded to afterwards wouldn't do it and it was just sort of a quirk of that particular platform so there you go so those are my results for the 890 FX versus the 990 FX I would pretty much call this probably some kind of a weird glitch but the funny thing is this is like significantly more playable on this platform then like this is a crappy yet 50 fps and this is a good 60 you can really feel it in those drops so thank you for checking out my video on the crosshair 5 formula versus the crosshair 4 formula 990 FX 890 FX don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos and no yeah here's that black socket indicating the am3+ a compatibility very cool stuff okay this is driving me crazy I'm gonna do it one more time so I put the Christ of the cross hair five back on the bench firing up Crysis 2 again well guess I'll have to restart before I do that and then yeah I'm changing absolutely zero game settings I checked gpu-z it's running at 16x in this slot all of that stuff so let's see what happens let's see if I can reproduce these results I gave well I figured it out here's my result with the 990 FX so fifty point eight so I can throw this guy out because here's what happened the 990 FX board is set to the wrong date in the BIOS which caused my fraps results to be out of order because I sort it by date modified in order to make it simple for me to see which is the last benchmark I ran so the true result and it must have been my imagination that it was running smoother on here the true result is around 50 fps and performance is equivalent thank you for your patience while I sorted out this little technical matter and I guess thanks for coming along on the ride don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos