MSI 870A Fuzion Power Edition EXCLUSIVE Review
Gaming and Lucid Hydra Performance
Published: 23rd September 2010 | Source: MSI | Price: £120 Est |
For our gaming benchmarks, we have also included results for our testbed with MSI's OC Genie function enabled. This should offer a valuable indication of the performance difference that the 870A Fuzion's automated overclocking function can offer.
3DMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage is Futuremarks flagship gaming oriented benchmark at present and is considered to be a demanding one at that. Our tests were carried out under the "Performance" prefix.
Both overclocks result in a significant increase in CPU and GPU scores, using our Radeon HD 5870. This might be an indication of CPU dependancy in the benchmark however scores in the range of 18,000 are exactly what one would expect with this graphics card.
Crysis Warhead
Crysis Warhead is without a doubt one hard nut to crack, especially at higher resolutions.
Small gains are to be had by CPU overclocking in Crysis Warhead in terms of maximum and consequently average framerates. As expected minimum frates remain largely the same, however at 35fps and above this is a fluid gaming environment regardless.
Metro 2033
Metro 2033, is another popular game we were curious to see if an 800MHz boost in core frequency would push those framerates out of the gutter.
Annoyingly Metro 2033's performance gains remained relatively flat despite a substantial CPU overclock. We did however notice a mild boost in minimum framerates.
Mafia 2
Mafia 2 is a recent action-adventure game. With plenty of eyecandy we were keen to see how well it would perform on our Socket AM3 testbed.
We wrap up our gaming tests with yet another set of results that show minimal gains from the processor overclock.
Lucid Hydra Performance
At last we get to the interesting bit. Up until now we've used a single Radeon HD 5870 for our testing process. However in order to showcase Lucid's Hydra we'll be introducing two new Multi GPU configurations
1) Radeon HD 5770 + GTX 460
2) Radeon HD 5870 + GTX 480
3DMark Vantage
Working from the lowest score upwards, the introduction of a GTX 460 offers a 77% increase in GPU score and a 57% increase overall. Interestingly when we ramp up our processor overclock, we see a further 3% increase in GPU scores, which may suggest a small level of processor dependency.
For the testing of the high end graphics cards, we decided not to waste any time with benchmarking at 3.20GHz and so we worked with our overclock instead. The addition of the range topping GTX 480 brought a 47% increase in GPU score to the table while only a more paltry 33% gain overall.
We began to wonder if our 1090T just wasn't up to the task in this synthetic benchmark. Perhaps the gains might have remained linear with an Intel Core i7 970/980X?
On the other hand, we also wondered about the link between the AMD 770 chipset and the Lucid Hydra. It is our understanding that they interact via a single 16x link. Lucid insist that this would never be the root cause of poor performance, but in future we may investigate this. Finally we cannot discount the fact that the technology is still in its infancy and that future driver iterations will yield better performance increases.
Some interesting findings here. Let's wrap this one up.
Most Recent Comments
great looking board....
Cheers for the heads up tom, board looks mental.
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Originally Posted by El Gappo
When he pressed the OC genie button it automatically opened up an msn chat with me |
I have the MSI P55-GD65 and the OC genie button works like Poo
Fantastic as ever guys, and a special thanks to Mul for absolutely kicking the s**t out of it.
Fabulous stuff.
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Originally Posted by El Gappo
When he pressed the OC genie button it automatically opened up an msn chat with me Cheers for the heads up tom, board looks mental. |
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Originally Posted by SiN
Dude, I didn't know you were on here! It's D3FiN3 SiN/firestormcomputers from OCN . |
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Originally Posted by SiN
Dude, I didn't know you were on here! It's D3FiN3 SiN/firestormcomputers from OCN . |
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Originally Posted by tinytomlogan
All the cool kids are here |
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Originally Posted by tinytomlogan
All the cool kids are here |
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Originally Posted by tinytomlogan
All the cool kids are here |
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Originally Posted by tinytomlogan
All the cool kids are here |
And yes, I am now a cool kid
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Originally Posted by Delusion77
I guess this board really surprised you guys |
TTl your cpu-z sig is looking much healthier now
Also can I run 2x460 SLI on this motherboard?
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Originally Posted by Zeals
What's the best heat sink for this if i want to fill all memory slots, the RAM is 35mm tall. Also can I run 2x460 SLI on this motherboard? |
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Originally Posted by Mul
2 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (16x/16x Dual CrossfireX, SLI, ATi + nVidia)
2 x PCIe 1x 1 x PCI |
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Originally Posted by AlienALX
The Noctua NH14 will clear regular ram. It only has issues with Dominator ram. |
I wasn't aware that loads of companies made oversized tbh. I know Gskill do that Ripjaw stuff.
You do need to run a Physx mod/hack (mod is a nicer word) but yes, you can.
You might need to run that mod for this board, I don't know. Usually Nvidia disables Physx when it sees an ATI card present. And the way it does this is the driver looks at the Device manager and then at the DEV_ID for the graphics cards. If it sees the ATI DEV number (1002 as the vendor code) then it simply disables the Physx function. However, this is easy to get around using GenL Physx Mod 1.04ff.
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