KitGuru Annual Awards 2013

Looking at the global market for dedicated processors, AMD's position is not strong.

While the assault of the APU has continued unabated, the FX series provided less of a kick that AMD might have hoped – and it hasn't managed to get the line-ups exactly right in the press – too often getting its ‘K' series processors compared directly with Intel ‘K' chips, that can cost a lot more.

That said, gamers recognise value when they see it – and a quick look at the Steam Powered Survey for the end of 2013, shows that AMD processors are being used by 26% of the hard core gamers on the game delivery platform.

Additionally, the single biggest AMD group is for processors that are running at more than 3GHz, compared to the +2.3GHz group for Intel.

So there we have it: AMD is still selling discrete processors to a gaming audience and they are feeling the need for speed.

If you want to buy an FX-6000 or FX-8000 series processor and clock the nuts off it on a totally stable platform … which board should you choose?

Around the £150 mark, Asrock offers the 9900FX Extreme9 – which has impressive overclocking potential – but is not for amateurs.

KitGuru first tried the automatic options and they are pretty competent however when we delved into the BIOS itself we managed to wangle even better results.

And, let's be honest, the UEFI BIOS provided is very straightforward. You can save up to 3 BIOS profiles, which is not bad, although we were hoping for more.

In terms of additional features, Asrock includes USB transfer acceleration (XFast USB) and XFast RAM which can boost overall performance in systems with oodles of DDR3.

In our test set-up, we used an AMD Bulldozer FX-8350 and a Cooler Master Seidon 120M liquid cooling unit. Together, these components allowed us to achieve a stable 4.6GHz clock, which pushed up the Cinebench 11.5 scores by almost 13%.

Read our review, over here.

If you are looking to build a serious AMD system, then the KitGuru Award for Best AMD Mainboard Overall in 2013 goes to the Asrock 990FX Extreme9.

Buy from Overclockers UK, from this link.

Become a Patron!