Does half the copper halve performance of ASRock's latest motherboard effort - we're keen to find out...
You don't need a degree in psychoneuroimmunology to work out that the Extreme3 doesn't sit at the top of the premium tech market. A quick search online for a motherboard using the AMD 890GX chipset returns only one brand listed as cheaper than this one, and for a cost of only $170, the Extreme3 is cheaper than the lowest-end models from both ASUS and MSI - and the gap between it and GIGABYTE is even larger. Logic dictates that features have had to drop out to keep price down, but on its surface, the board feels surprisingly full-featured.
A black PCB meshes well with the dark blue and white colour scheme, though the first point of contention is noticed when we lifted the board proper - it's noticeably lighter than the competing brands. This is because it uses the traditional single-ounce copper design in the PCB layers; a cheaper solution that others have moved away from for both stability and an extra feature to list on the packaging. It also has a practical use for rigidity - the Extreme3 flexes noticeably.
The power delivery to the AM3 socket is relatively average low-end fare, though it's either slightly overenthusiastic or unmotivated in alternate seconds. A core voltage of 1.5V resulted in 1.432V on the v1.10 BIOS, with significant vDroop that affected stability, and the same voltage artificially boosted itself to 1.552V when we flashed to v2.30. Thankfully for a budget board the BIOS doesn't skip on functionality, and is comparable to ASUS - even coming with a handy USB stick flashing tool - though strangely comes with an array of boot screen images that rotate each time the system is powered on.
USB3 ports come standard through the NEC chip onboard, followed by the surprising inclusion of VIA's nice VT2020 audio chip and a physical Clear CMOS button on the I/O panel. Hard power and reset buttons also make a showing alongside a LED POST screen, and though the latter doesn't display anything but POST errors, it's still welcomed. Six standard SATA3 ports are run off the SB850 chipset as normal, and the NorthBridge chip boasts a basic integrated graphics processor that can drive two screens at once with just enough grunt for HD video decoding.
Performance at stock settings was quite good compared to MSI's 890FXA-GD70 from last Issue using the same Phenom II X6 1090T, beating it across every test with an aggressive boost given from AMD's Turbo CORE tech. This showing mostly continued at the first OC step, though faltered upon the second step and tripped up on itself - being far too enthusiastic in boosting speed and crashing. It crashed so hard we had to remove the CMOS battery for a hard reset, but it came back functionally once this was done. Turbo CORE was disabled and we garnered some decent performance, though it was much lower than the MSI board.
We kept pushing the board as far as it would go, and ultimately reached the same maximum speed we generated with this chip in earlier testing - 4288MHz at 268x16 - though it only returned a CineBench multi score of 23546, 1183 points lower at the same speed. The board was also quite finicky and unstable, though remained cool even at these speeds.
For a budget 890GX board this is an interesting choice, though for long-term overclocking stability it may be worth spending more.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012