3D Performance
This is when the real flaws can rear their ugly heads. Four core full gpu loads are the most taxing loads you can run on an APU. Not just in the flow of data that’s being put in and out of the chip, but also in the form of power consumption. If you’re going to have thermal throtteling problems or see and over agressive power state and dynamic power managment problem, this is where it shows up.
Also discussed earlier the OC results for these runs where somewhat rushed, while dealing with bugs that originally resulted in the inability to complete 3d benchmarks while overclocked, or at least complete them with the board working correctly (performance below stock due to bugs isn’t seen as working correctly in my book).
All benchmarks except one were capable of completing the OC portion of the benchmarks at 1267mhz IGP speed. 3d03 would not run at that IGP speed, I probably could have figured out why given more time. However it was decided to just drop the multiplier one resulting in the benchmark being done at 1167mhz IGP speed instead.
ASRock is really proud of their Vantage score. They advertise it as a feature even that they are capable of 7800+ with 2600mhz ram, right on the box. So of course I felt it nessisary to put this to the test. Sadly the chip I have will not run 2600mhz ram on air/water stable. Even after obtaining the same speed and timings of ram that they used in their testing (just in case) it was a no go. But we did get the next best thing.
On air the Extreme6 pulled off an impressive 6716 in vantage at stock speeds. Thats around 100 points higher than the up4, and around 1000 points over what is the suggested baseline performance level with lower speed ram. Throw some extra volts in there and crank the IGP to its limits (1267mhz before useing other software or pure bios settings and bclk stepping) without really stepping into the thick of it OC wise. We show an impressive result of 8431 on water. Which is just a little above the 7800 mark that they advertise on faster memory at that. Tempertures where really the limiting factor at this point.
I might also add that Vantage is my perferred stability test for APU’s. The mix of a heavy amount of CPU load across the cores and the heavy graphics push will usually show problems in a APU setup. Thermal varations often show themselves on the the CPU portion of the tests. The hotter your chip gets the lower the score normally. If thermal throttleing or memory problems are happening it can result in a very obvious change in score.
While vantage can thoroughly tax an APU 3D mark despite being a heavy load is a little more forgiving in the stability department. It tends to show more consistency on all performance fronts than vantage aswell.
The numbers The Extreme 6 falls back some on this benchmark. While che core Physics performance is higher than that of the up4 the Graphics performance falls off in this benchmark. Enough to show a rather large difference in score of almost 300 points in the overall score.
ASRock Is currently working on a graphics fix for what seems to be excessive thermal throttling of the IGP at some points. Which appears to be showing its head on the Stock benchmarks.
I ran into this problem a few times before discovering a extremely unconventional fix for it leaving it outside of the realm of a stock solution. The fix was used however while showing off the oc results. Since no 3d OC results would of been possible without it.
Again we see a bit of a problem with 3D performance in comparison to the UP4 at stock speeds. Though the OC results show promise.
Heaven is another interesting benchmark on APUs. It’s an extremely GPU bound benchmark, with CPU performance not showing a huge amount of performance increase int he benchmark, unless it directly relates to I/O performance.
The Extreme6 shows its graphics performance bug again during the dx11 tests. However the OC results show just how big of a difference Clock speed effects IGP performance on this platform. While the DirectX11 performance is only a few marks higher. The DX9 performance is decent leap ahead of the stock performance levels.
