MSI 870A Fuzion (AMD 770) Motherboard

With any system you will want to see a combination of synthetic testing and real-world. Synthetics give you a static, easily repeatable testing method that can be compared across multiple platforms. For our synthetic tests we use Everest Ultimate, Sisoft Sandra, FutureMark's 3DMark Vantage and PCMark Vantage, Cinebench as well as HyperPi. Each of these covers a different aspect of performance or a different angle of a certain type of performance.

Memory Bandwidth

Memory is a big part of current system performance. In most systems slow or flakey memory performance will impact almost every type of application you run. To test memory we use a combination of Sisoft Sandra, Everest and HyperPi 0.99.

Sisoft Sandra

Version and / or Patch Used: 2010c 1626
Developer Homepage: http://www.sisoftware.net
Product Homepage: http://www.sisoftware.net
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How to rate this one; well, considering we are comparing a 770 chipset to an 890, being .2GB/s behind is not bad at all really. With the much faster memory speed during our overclocked run we see things really take off with the 870A Fuzion.

Everest Ultimate

Version and / or Patch Used: 5.30.1983
Developer Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com
Product Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com
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Everest Ultimate is a suite of tests and utilities that can be used for system diagnostics and testing. For our purposes here we use their memory bandwidth test and see what the theoretical performance is.

Everest gives us a little more information to work with. We find that the 870A (770 chipset) has good copy speed, but is very slow in terms of write and not that good for read. This will impact our tests like HyperPi, LightWave 3D and Auto GK. It can also impact gaming to a very small extent. Even overclocked to 1622MHz the write speeds are far from where they should be.

HyperPi 0.99

Version and / or Patch Used: 0.99
Developer Homepage: https://www.virgilioborges.com.br
Product Homepage: https://www.virgilioborges.com.br
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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.

At stock speed the 870A Fuzion is a tad slow to calculate the number Pi to 32 million places. This is probably a direct reflection of the memory performance issue we saw above, but it could also be an issue with HDD speed, but we will find that out soon enough.