Synthetic Benchmarks
In order to see what differences exist from a performance standpoint, we run a whole bunch of synthetic benchmarks. We’ll create a bunch of pretty graphs to show you if if any performance differences exist between these two sibling chipsets.
3DMarkVantage
While we’ve technically beaten this one to death in both previous articles, we wanted to get both boards on equal footing with the same parts and same software updates. This is to see if there are any 3D performance differences between the two boards. Here’s what we found out.
Not surprisingly, the two boards perform very similarly with only a few points difference. This is not surprising considering that the 890GX and 890FX share a lot of similarities except for the integrated graphics.
PCMark Vantage x64
Moving right along, we check in on the productivity side to see if any differences exist between the 890GX and 890FX.
Areas of note include benchmarks for hard drive (or rather SSD) performance, communication, and music. These variances are reflected in the overall PCMark Vantage score which gives up the lead to the 890FX. While these benchmarks give a general direction of performance, we’ll confirm some of the areas of greatest variance with some alternate benchmarks.
SiSoftware SANDRA
This benchmark gives us a good snapshot of overall performance at the CPU and memory level. Let’s see if any major variances exist between the 890GX and 890FX.
For the most part, memory and CPU performance metrics between the two motherboards and chipsets are pretty much identical and the differences are too small to be significant. Again, not unexpected considering how much similarity there is between the two chipsets.
Cinebench 11.5
Taking the CPU, memory, and to a lesser extent, GPU performance into account, Cinebench gives us a good look at overall bandwidth and performance of these two areas. We compare the two chipsets once again to see just how close they are.
Our benchmarks show very minor differences between the two platforms in this benchmark. Any variances are pretty much a wash in this case, but could explain the minor differences in the 3DMark Vantage benchmarks. But overall, there’s nothing to write home about.