Introduction and Package
Introduction
Now that the all mighty NDA has lifted on the new Llano platform, we're able to bring to you all those motherboards that support the new APU from AMD. Today we'll be looking at the GIGABYTE A75-UD4H. Like the ASUS board, we have already done an extensive preview on this one, so if you haven't already looked at it, I highly recommend you go check out GIGABYTE A75-UD4H (AMD A75) Llano Motherboard Preview to see what's going on with the look of the board and the bundle.
In that particular preview we didn't get a chance to look at the BIOS, so that's where we'll be starting out today. Once we've done that we'll look at our testbed, what else we'll be including in our benchmarks today and of course the overclocking side of things.
GIGABYTE has been in the spotlight for the last few weeks with their A75 boards breaking all kinds of IGP records. Fingers crossed today we'll see the same kind of success from the board with some big clocks on offer.
First, though, let's start with what's going on with the BIOS on the A75-UD4H before we get into the really fun stuff.
BIOS
Unlike most of the other motherboard manufacturers, we see that GIGABYTE have chosen to stick with that older style BIOS design and not opt for the graphical interface that we're seeing from most other companies. It's not a bad thing, because as you go in to the BIOS you find yourself having a good idea of where to go when it comes to overclocking or disabling features.
The big problem at the moment is that a lot of people find themselves unsure what kind of voltages they can use when it comes to overclocking the new platform. As you can see above, we've got a lot of normal voltages like CPU PLL, DDR3 and CPU, but we've also got some new ones like APU VDDP and FCH. No doubt as time goes on, though, people will figure out the best place to sit with these voltages.
As for the rest of the BIOS, there's no real surprises; each section is fairly self-explanatory and if you've used a GIGABYTE Award BIOS over the last few years you should know exactly what's going on.
Test System Setup and Overclocking
We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, G.Skill, Kingston, Mittoni and Corsair.
When it comes to the lineup today there's nothing out of the ordinary. For comparison today we've got the ASUS F1A75-V Pro motherboard which also supports the A8-3850, while we've got our Phenom II X6 1100T in our 990X ASUS M5A99X EVO.
For the GIGABYTE A75-UD4H we'll be testing our A8-3850 both at stock and overclocked form, so before we get into the benchmark side of things let's first see what's going on with the overclock on offer.
For weeks now GIGABYTE have been releasing details on their motherboards and overclocking results with the A8-3850. Prior to launch they had managed to break IGP records that focused on the onboard graphics side of things.
With so much talk about overclocking on the GIGABYTE prior to the launch, I had high hopes for the platform when it came to overclocking and looking below, you can see it didn't disappoint.
Pushing our A8-3850 to just over 3.7GHz is no easy task, but no doubt GIGABYTE have done a good job in the BIOS and the board itself to make sure the overclocking potential is present. We ended up with our bus speed at 131MHz and we managed to leave the multiplier at the stock x29.
The only thing we found with the board is that it didn't like to clock our memory up as high as others. We did grab the latest BIOS from the GIGABYTE website which said it improved things and it did. Unfortunately it wasn't quite as strong as we had hoped. With that said, we're sure that there's going to be more BIOSs come out in the near future as we're seeing a lot of companies tweak the BIOS of these A75 boards still.
The other thing is, prior to the launch we saw GIGABYTE show results with memory at over 2200MHz DDR. AMD is quite picky when it comes to RAM so we don't doubt with the right combination there's some serious speed to be had from the platform when it comes to the memory side of things.
Let's get started!
CPU Benchmarks
AIDA64
Version and / or Patch Used: 1.00.1035BETA
Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com
Product Homepage: http://www.AIDA64.com
Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.
At stock there's nothing out of the ordinary when we compare it to our other A75 based motherboard. Overclocked, though, you can see a very strong increase in performance where you can see it lines up with a stock X6 1100T on a 990X motherboard.
CPU Benchmarks Continued
HyperPi 0.99
Version and / or Patch Used: 0.99
Developer Homepage: www.virgilioborges.com.br
Product Homepage: www.virgilioborges.com.br
HyperPi is a front end for SuperPi that allows for multiple concurrent instances of SuperPi to be run on each core recognized by the system. It is very dependent on CPU to memory to HDD speed. The faster these components, the faster it is able to figure out the number Pi to the selected length.
For our testing we use the 32M run. This means that each of the four physical and four logical cores for the i7 and the four physical cores of the i5 is trying to calculate the number Pi out to 32 million decimal places. Each "run" is a comparative to ensure accuracy and any stability or performance issues in the loop mentioned above will cause errors in calculation.
Hyper Pi performance is again where you'd expect it to be when the board is running at stock. Overclocked we can again see a good increase in performance with the Hyper Pi time coming in over 10% faster.
AutoGK
Version and / or Patch Used: 2.55
Developer Homepage: http://www.autogk.me.uk/
Product Homepage: http://www.autogk.me.uk/
AutoGK stands for Auto Gordian Knot; it is a suite of transcoding tools that are compiled into an easy to install and use utility. It allows you to transcode non-protected DVDs and other media to Xvid or Divx format. For our testing purposes we use a non-DRM restricted movie that is roughly 2 hours in length. This is transcoded to a single Xvid AVI at 100% quality.
At stock we can see the GIGABYTE A75-UD4H was a little faster than the ASUS board when running at stock. Overclocked you can see that the encoding time is improved again and performance comes quite close to that more expensive 1100T setup on the 990X board.
Storage Benchmarks
AIDA64
Version and / or Patch Used: 1.00.1035BETA
Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com
Product Homepage: http://www.AIDA64.com
Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.
USB 2.0 performance on the A75 GIGABYTE board is strong and shows it coming in slightly faster than the competition here. As for hard drive performance, you can see that's also very strong and again in this instance you can see it's a little faster than the competition.
Memory Benchmarks
Sisoft Sandra
Version and / or Patch Used: 2011
Developer Homepage: http://www.sisoftware.net
Product Homepage: http://www.sisoftware.net
SiSoft Sandra memory performance is a little all over the place and you can see even overclocked the extra speed shows no difference here. Hopefully we'll get a better picture of what's going on in AIDA64.
AIDA64
Version and / or Patch Used: 1.00.1035BETA
Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com
Product Homepage: http://www.AIDA64.com
Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.
While across the board we can see the read performance for memory is quite similar, the GIGABYTE board seems to sit a little lower when it comes to write performance. Overclocked, though, we can see a massive boost in performance for write performance and it's able to outperform the other two setups we have here.
Gaming Benchmarks
3DMark 11
Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.3dmark.com/3dmark11/
3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world's most popular benchmark. Designed to measure your PC's gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.
Aliens vs. Predator
Version and / or Patch Used: Standalone Benchmark
Timedemo or Level Used: Built in Benchmark
Developer Homepage: http://www.rebellion.co.uk/
Product Homepage: http://www.sega.com/games/aliens-vs-predator/
Aliens vs. Predator is a science fiction first-person shooter video game, developed by Rebellion Developments, the team behind the 1999 original PC game, and published by Sega for Microsoft Windows, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. The game is based on the Alien vs. Predator franchise, a combination of the characters and creatures of the Alien franchise and the Predator franchise. There are three campaigns in the game, one for each race/faction (the Predators, the Aliens and the Colonial Marines), that, while separate in terms of individual plot and gameplay, form one overarching storyline.
Following the storyline of the campaign modes comes the multiplayer aspect of the game. In this Multiplayer section of the game, players face off in various different gametypes in various different ways.
Getting into the 3D benchmarking side of things, we can see that everything lines up just as we'd expect it to. At stock we can see that the performance preset for 3DMark 11 sits back a little due to what seems to be a bit of a CPU limitation. We continue to see overclocked performance is strong and you can see in the performance preset where that CPU limitation was preset, we get an added boost to our score thanks to the extra breathing room the HD 6970 has now.
Temperature and Power
Core Temperature
Because Core Temp doesn't work with the current crop of A series APU we have to rely on companies own software. For stock speeds the CPU temps line up with our other A75 offering. Of course, when we overclock we do see the temperature jump up in both idle and load.
Power Draw Tests
We again see at stock the GIGABYTE A75-UD4H lines up with our other A75 offering. Overclocked, though, we can see a big jump in power draw; idle almost doubles and at load we see almost another 100watt of power draw. Again, though, it's no surprise as we do indeed run more voltage through the whole system which is going to in turn increase the power that is drawn.
Final Thoughts
It's no surprise that GIGABYTE was about to break world records when it came to IGP based ones. This is a fast board that offers a lot of performance when it comes to overclocking, and while we didn't have as much joy with the memory overclock, we've seen GIGABYTE achieve higher speeds without issue.
The biggest issue when it comes to RAM is that AMD systems just don't play as nicely as Intel ones. The Llano platform has shown some very strong memory overclock capabilities and I think for that reason we'll see more and more memory manufacturers offer us high performance AMD specific kits.
Feature wise the A75-UD4H offers us everything we want, but one of the more stand out features on it would have to be the fact that GIGABYTE have opted for a Dual-Link DVI connector on the back of their board. For a lot of people this might not be a huge issue, but what I like about it is the fact that you could use a 30" monitor with the system and not have a need for an extra video card.
While gaming at 2560 x 1600 is going to be out of the question, the fact that you could build a small, low powered system that doesn't have the need for another separate video card is impressive. From a productive perspective this is great as you can have a high resolution desktop which gives you plenty of room and build a system that's not only inexpensive, but inexpensive to run due to the fact its power draw is so low.
Considering just how strong the A8-3850 can overclock and the amount of power that's on offer from such a middle of the road system, I'd love to see GIGABYTE offer us an all-black PCB model much like the UD5 models and up that we see with their Z68 boards. People could end up making some really mean looking systems that come in at a strong price point and still offer us plenty of power. It would just be nice to have that Black PCB / Gold accent on the heatsink that we see their higher end boards like the UD7 offer.
GIGABYTE has ultimately done a great job with the A75 based motherboard and it manages to show us the overclocking potential that's on offer from the new chipset. Priced at $129.99 US, the board lines up where you'd expect a top of the range A75 board to and in conjunction with an A8-3850 you can have yourself an extremely strong system.
The fact that this platform is able to fill in such a broad range when it comes to computer habits is what makes it so appealing. Home theater PC, basic LAN box, low powered work station and Internet machine to name just a few means that it is so strong for the mass market.