ASRock FM2A88X Extreme6+ Review
by Ian Cutress on March 19, 2014 11:59 AM ESTASRock FM2A88X Extreme6+ Conclusion
Motherboards bearing the FM2+ name fall into two categories – those released before the Kaveri launch in January and those released alongside or after. For the first category, certain assumptions about the state of the final Kaveri silicon had to be made, and the motherboards built around those assumptions. Because of the processing node difference between Richland and Kaveri and the differing voltage characteristics of the two processors therein, it was important to ‘over-engineer’ a motherboard to consider the potential consequences a hungry Kaveri could have made.
A similar comparison could be drawn with 990FX motherboards, first taking Zosma/Thuban K10 style cores and then moving onto the Bulldozer/Piledriver combination that exists. Some 990FX motherboards built could not seem to handle the stress of the new architecture.
The ASRock FM2A88X Extreme6+ is not that problematic – it will run both Richland and Kaveri without skipping a beat, as long as sufficient provisions are made to the power delivery cooling especially if the system is overclocked. It seems rough that the system would provide very high temperatures at stock (or stock + 20 minutes of intense CPU usage), but that is the unfortunate reality of the situation of our review. Ultimately this leads to the recommendation that users update the BIOS before they start installing an operating system, which in our testing led to a better temperature gradient after heavy CPU loading.
Temperature issues aside, the Extreme6+ sits at the top end of ASRock’s FM2 stack, with the Realtek ALC1150 audio codec, additional USB 3.0 ports and the BIOS/software platform being worthy of note. In performance terms ASRock trades blows with another motherboard we have on our test bed but not yet reviewed, although we will have to test a number of other FM2+ motherboards to see where it stacks up against the competition. Having a POST time lower than 10 seconds is a plus, although the lack of extras in the box for a high end FM2+ motherboard might be cause for concern. For legacy users who want to dabble with HSA, lots of memory, PCI and a COM port, ASRock has you covered with the FM2A88X Extreme6+.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
44 Comments
View All Comments
niva - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
These benchmarks are making me depressed for AMD CPUs. I guess it's time to switch to Intel after not having purchased an Intel chip since 1996.nathanddrews - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
Come on in, the water's fine.Malorcus - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
I hear you man, I did the same with my current Ive Bridge CPU. I am looking to build a media computer using an AMD APU though. They still have their niche, but it is not in high end computing/gaming.ddriver - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
You'd be surprised by the amount of needed and commercially viable tasks for which those poor CPUs are more than fast enough. It is a sad thing to see AMD struggling to compete with Intel's value products.Fallen Kell - Thursday, March 20, 2014 - link
AMD has sadly not had a real competing product in the high end side for 6 or 7 years now. On the low end, AMD was competing, until Intel decided to compete in this market segment. The last two updates that Intel has made were more focused on the lower end than on the high end. This is finally cutting into the one thing keeping AMD alive. I really hope AMD does survive because those of us that are old enough to remember know that Intel hates the consumer and only really pushes technology when it is competing. We would have CPU's that are only soldered directly into motherboards with no ability to upgrade, completely locked down CPUs with no ability to overclock, locked in memory bus speeds that are tiered based on the CPU/motherboard that you purchased with higher performance memory compatibility costing you extra, etc., etc....But I really don't see a way that AMD can compete at this point. They are still hemorrhaging money (not nearly as bad as a year ago when they lost $1.2 BILLION, but even after restructuring to cut 31% of their operating costs, they still lost $162 million last year). While I understood the reason for acquiring ATI, I believe ATI is worse off due to that acquisition. ATI went from being a profitable company competing well in their market, to one that is losing money and is seemingly almost a generation behind Nvidia in their offerings (I say this based on the fact that the brand new released top of the line AMD graphics cards can barely beat the last generation of cards from Nvidia in performance and can not come anywhere near the Nvidia offerings in power/performance or heat/performance, and Nvidia is getting ready to release its true next generation of cards even while they simply released the last generation of cards at their full potential to beat AMD's current cards now that AMD finally had a competing product). The major losses that AMD as a whole has, is taking its toll on the R&D AMD can afford to do in terms of increasing the efficiency of their designed with respect to power and cooling requirements while still being able to push the performance of their cards.
Demiurge - Friday, March 21, 2014 - link
Funny, I thought the same thing about Intel CPU's when GPU's started to encroach on the high performance features such as physics, ray-tracing, signal processing, and other high intensity applications. There's a bigger picture that I think a lot of people miss. The market has already shifted away from CPU's being the centerpiece of high performance applications. AMD has the right strategy with buying ATI and the paradigm of Heterogeneous Computing, but like Intel with the P4: it's too little too late. If they had the software, they might've been able to pull this off, but that is exactly what they are trying to do with Mantle. I think only unanimous adoption would've guaranteed a win. It was a big risk, and it would have been an amazing upstart, but I don't think it will pay off as much as they need it to. Just a modest opinion... and so a long rant ends... ;-)pandemonium - Thursday, March 20, 2014 - link
AMD hasn't been competitive to Intel for the consumer since 1999 or so? They've always been cheaper, and always been far lower in gaming and general desktop usage results as well. You are very, very, very late to the party, lol.mr_tawan - Thursday, March 20, 2014 - link
I believe it was Intel Core series (2006) that started to get ahead of AMD's CPU. Before that, AMD CPUs was both perform better and cheaper. Intel CPUs were power hungry and expensive while did not yield excellent performance.The raw ALU performance on the current line of AMD CPU is quite low because of the design decision to reduce the space occupied by the CPU while add even more GPU on the die, and then make them work together more nicely. It's the direction the AMD heads to.
I believe that one day even the FX line would be APU just like those A-series.
Vinny DePaul - Thursday, March 20, 2014 - link
I feel your pain. I am an AMD fan. I want to keep using AMD but the CPU is running too hot. It is heating up the room! I switch to Intel. It is just easier.... I hope the AMD's involvement in PS4 and Xbox One will shape the future in games and software.Xpl1c1t - Thursday, March 20, 2014 - link
This is exactly what I did going from a Athlon XP Palomino, to Athlon 64 Venice, to a Core i5 Lynnfield.I'd consider purchasing an AMD processor again if the whole APU thing becomes quite competent and powerful at a smaller and more efficient node. I'd promptly and gladly buy an APU with the equivalent of 2 IVB cores and a 7870 onboard if it could me mounted on a Pico-ITX board...