september 17 2010 review by tweaktown

In this test identical GPUs are combined, A-Mode for AMD GPUs and N-Mode for NVIDIA GPUs. These are the more stable and usable modes by both MSI and Lucid.

For the ATI A-Mode test the reviewer used 2 ASUS EAH5870 V2 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Edition graphics cards. These are factory overclocked to 868MHz with a GDDR5 memory speed of 4800MHz.

In the NVIDIA tests 2 GIGABYTE GV-N470SO-13I Super Clocked GTX470 video cards were used. This video card is factory overclocked with a GPU speed of 700MHz, a memory clock of 3348MHz and a nice 1280MB of GDDR5.

Conclusion:

Many times you will not see a significant performance increase when you drop in a second GPU. It is one of those things that works, or doesn't.

MSI and Lucid have a lot of work to do on the Fuzion drivers to make them work better under the stress of real world gaming.

Benchmarks:

3DMark Vantage, Unigine Heaven 2.0 Bench and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Far Cry 2, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Bioshock 2, Metro 2033.

There is not much of a boost when running Fuzion and the Stalker bench. The N-mode was even somewhat slower than the stock GV-N470SO-13I.

september 3 2010 review by tweaktown

Conclusion: This mobo is a very solid platform. If you want to build a gaming machine or do some productivity work, this board is the right choice. Unfortunately the reviewers didn't test the Fuzion functionality. The HDD performance is a little behind the current SB850 and stock memory performance is right behind the current 890FX.

Overclocking:

A Phenom II X6 1090T was OCed @ 3.92GHz (245x16). Although the tools were there and easy to use, the board was picky about settings and voltages, Cool and Quiet had to be turned off and the voltages were pushed higher than the reviewers would normally do.

Benchmarks:

Temperature, Power Consumption, HyperPi, Lightwave 3D, AutoGK, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, 3D Mark Vantage, Cinebench, Far Cry 2, Lavalys Everest Ultimate, PC mark vantage, Sisoft Sandra. In the gaming benches an AMD Radeon HD5870 1GB was used.

Compared To:

ASUS M4A89GTD PRO USB3

Test Setup:

• Memory: 2x2GB Corsair CMT4GX3M2A2000C8.
• SSD: Corsair Force F120 120GB.
• Water Cooler: Corsair H70.
• PSU: Corsair AX1200 1200 watt.
• OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64.