ASRock X58 Extreme3: An Enthusiast X58 Motherboard at a Budget Price?
by Ian Cutress on June 2, 2010 4:10 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- ASRock
- X58
Far Cry 2
Featuring fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine, this game also features one of the most impressive benchmark tools we have seen in a PC game. The built in benchmark tool runs a preset sequence of ingame action, to model real world gameplay. The tool runs the benchmark three times by default, to which the fps values are averaged for our results.
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We can see a clear loss here for the Extreme3 in both single and dual GPU setups. The overclock benefited the dual GPU setup a lot more than the single GPU setup, showing that CPU data transfer and processing eventually becomes a bottleneck in good configurations for Far Cry 2.
Unigine Heaven
Unigine Heaven is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark Unigine Corp, supporting DirectX 9, 10 and 11, OpenGL 4.0, tesselation and SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion). The benchmark is an efficient test of DirectX 11 techniques across 24 different visual scenarios. The benchmark outputs an average and minimum fps score, however we cannot reliably look at minimum fps, as on rare occasions it would dip to around 5fps for a single frame which was not repeatable.
There is very little difference between both motherboards, although the Extreme3 does consistently score lower.
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Glenn - Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - link
I believe for $15 more I would go with the Gigabyte X58A-UD3R. I like asrock boards and have had good luck in the past using them, but they need to provide more wow at this pricepoint or be substatially less than the proven enthusiast boards.DigitalFreak - Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - link
Yep, it makes no sense. The comparison should have been with the X58A-UD3R, even if it is a few dollars more.You get 4 PCI-E x16 slots (x16+x16, x16+x8+x8, x8, x8, x8, x8), two PCI-E x1 slots and ONE PCI slot. How many people really need more than 1 PCI slot anymore?
bobvodka - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
Well, I do for one.. I'm currently using a Creative X-Fi Elite Pro sound card which is PCI. I'm sticking with it because it has an awesome IO console I can sit on my desk so I can swap quickly to headphones and between headphone sets (one set is better for general usage, but when I need to talk to people I've got a headset I use but the sound repro isn't quite as good). So, while it still works I'll stick with it, heck I don't even know if the later PCIe X-Fi cards can even drive the IO Console...On my current X58 motherboard my other PCIe slots are either;
- being used for graphics
- being used for a PCIe wifi card
- being used for a GTS-260 physx card
- blocked
bobvodka - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
oh, I totally misread the comment I was replying to... disregard the above, I thought it said 'requires one PCI slot'; sorry.Araemo - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
I have to agree. I have only had one ASRock board... it was so extremely picky, with misleading and undocumented BIOS settings that impacted stability and overclocking greatly, and nonexistant support.That said, for the price, it gave me a (after months of fiddling) 95% stable, high performance system for 2 years for a fraction of the price I'd have paid for another board. But it only lasted about those 2 years before it started showing random crashes, lock ups, disappearing DVD drives, and other odd issues.
Araemo - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
Also, since when is a $180 motherboard considered a budget price? Damn. I just built my wife a computer with a (now quad-core) AMD processor of decent performance with a very solid ASUS motherboard.. the motherboard cost $70. I can understand paying $100-$150 for a feature-rich overclocking motherboard, but that isn't what I'd call a 'budget' price at all. :PTaft12 - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
Spoken like someone who has never looked at X58 motherboard pricing. Core i7 is for a different market than your wife.Pessimism - Thursday, June 3, 2010 - link
What the original poster is trying to say is that intel should immediately drop the core2, i3, and i5 lines, cut the pricing of the i7 line to sub-$100, cut x58 board pricing to $75 and advance computing as a whole while wiping AMD off the map.Araemo - Saturday, June 5, 2010 - link
I've looked at it - but the performance difference isn't worth the extra $400 you have to spend on an X58 based system Vs. and AMD or Core 2 Duo system.Affectionate-Bed-980 - Sunday, June 6, 2010 - link
Wrong comparison. X58-UDR3 is just outdated. I don't care about price. It's like comparing this year's car against last year's competitor. Okay? But that's not a direct comparison when talking new cars.... sigh.