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AMD on AMD with AMD - The platform company shows its stuff

Posted by By Robert Dow and Alex Garovi on July 8th 2010 | Comments Closed
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: amd graphics gaming review

After too many years of being criticized for not tooting their own horn enough, the technical marketing folks at AMD sent us a Vision Black machine to put through the paces. I think we may have to toot their horn—this is one impressive machine.

As configured, the system was pre-loaded with Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate, all the drivers already installed, and pre-loaded with AMD’s Fusion Media Explorer and the Fusion Utility software. Here is the system configuration:

• Antec Six Hundred Chassis.
• Corsair 750W PSU.
• Asus Crosshair IV motherboard based on AMD’s 890FX chipset with four PCIe slots.
• 4GB of OCZ DDR3.
• AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor (6-core @ 3.2GHz with 3.6GHz Turbo CORE boosting capability).
• ATI Radeon HD 5870 AIB.
• 60GB OCZ SSD (System Drive / OS installed here).
• 1TB HDD (storage drive), 7200 RPM.
• Blu-ray drive.

The system RAM is a nominal 1066. However, the reason we went with this memory is because it is on AMD’s B.E.M.P. list (Black Edition Memory Profile), so you can use AMD Overdrive to auto-tune (overclock) easily since there is a memory profile for those particular DIMMs. Audio is on-board on the Asus mobo.

So it’s a high-end AMD processor, a high-end AMD chipset, and a High-end AMD graphics AIB—AMD on AMD with AMD.

OK, now what?

We did everything but kick it off the roof for a shock test. We ran a single AIB through a suite of tests, then we ran the same AIB in over clocked mode, then we cranked the AIB back down and ran it Crossfire mode.

First observations were that we had to check that it was turned on, it’s one of the quietest (at idle) systems we’ve ever had.

We ran Unigine Heaven benchmarks on it for DirectX 11 tests as they are the most thorough.

We also ran “Stalker Call of Pripyat” in DirectX 11 We used three resolutions (2560x1600, 1920x1200, and 1650x1080), with tessellation and 4XAA on, in Extreme mode—about as tough a test you could run. We ran the same set of tests using an Intel Core i7 980 processor (6-core @ 3.2GHz with 3.9GHz Turbo capability) with X58 chipset system and compared the results on the four tests We used all four test modes (day, night, rain, and sun shafts.)

Both systems had an AMD Radeon HD5870 AIB with AMD’s Catalyst 10.6 driver.

This was a surprising set of results and one that will no doubt delight AMD. It suggests that AMD has tuned the chipset and CPU to run well with the 5870, and that’s an advantage a total platform supplier has.