ASRock A75 Extreme 6 (AMD A75) Motherboard Review

In June AMD released the A8-3850 APU which achieved the highest award on Kitguru, for the combination of competitive price and excellent performance. Since then we have reviewed several motherboards, including the excellent ASUS F1A75M pro and Sapphire Pure Platinum A75. Today we are looking at the latest ASRock A75 Extreme 6 which comes fully loaded. Over the last couple of years, we have seen ASRock move from a small player in the budget sector, to a fully fledged manufacturer of some of the industry's finest products, proven time and time again in our review analysis. The A75 Extreme 6 is another board marketed for the discerning enthusiast audience. The board uses ASRock DuraCap Polymer Capacitors for long life and improved stability. It has full support for all FM1 100W processors and is supplied with Native SATA 3 and USB 3.0 capabilities. With 3 way CrossfireX support and 7.1 channel audio with a full UEFI interface, they certainly don't appear to have cut any corners. As we have covered this platform before, today we are going to look at the ASRock A75 Extreme 6 when paired up with a killer gaming card - the Sapphire HD6870 Dual Fan Overclock Edition. We are also giving one of these graphics card away in a competition right now, so be sure to check that out. Need a recap on the Lynx Platform? Then head over to this page. The A75 Extreme 6 motherboard arrives in a distinctive ASRock box featuring a metallic style finish. The Bundle isn't one of the most comprehensive we have seen in recent months, but it is adequate. It features a back plate, four SATA cables, two manuals, driver CD and a 3.5 mm audio cable. The board follows a traditional colour scheme, featuring blue and white slots on a dark PCB. ASRock include three PCI-E x16 slots on this particular board, quite an improvement over the single slot we associate with many boards in this range. When you use a single card is runs at x16. Adding another in a CrossFire configuration forces them to x8 speed. The third slot is only x4. This is pretty much overkill for such a value oriented platform, but we can't complain. Along the bottom of the board is a HD Audio header, 1394 Firewire connector, HDMI S/PDIF and two USB 2.0 headers. ASrock have included a power and reset switch, as well as a diagnostic readout. To the right is another USB 2.0 connector and the front panel section. The board has four DDR3 DIMM slots to support up to a total of 32GB. The board natively supports speeds from 800mhz to 1866mhz, although ASRock claim 'OC' speeds up to 2400mhz. There are a total of eight SATA ports on the board. Six of them run natively from the A75 chipset at 6Gbps speeds. ASRock have added two extra which run from the ASMedia ASM 1061 controller - these are all SATA 3 ports. There are 3 and 4 pin headers close to the CPU, ideal for dual fan cooling solutions and chassis fans. There is a 8 pin CPU power connector nearby. There is plenty of room for oversized coolers around the CPU socket. The I/O plate is fully loaded with a combo PS/2 header above two USB 3.0 ports. Next to that is VGA, DVI and HDMI out. A handy reset CMOS button is here, to rescue the system from unstable situations. There is an eSATA port to the right, shared with the ASM1061 SATA III controller. Above this is a FireWire port and two USB 2.0 ports. Next to the onboard sound panel (RealTek ALC892 audio codec) is a Gigabit LAN port above two more USB 3.0 ports. On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. We received the motherboard with a very old bios installed. We upgraded to the newest 1.6 version with the Windows tool, which is automated and requires very little user intervention. Always a positive point in regards to something so critical. The UEFI design is a pleasure to use, and all the overclocking options are intuitively placed for easy access. We had some initial problems with memory, a problem we experienced with the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 board. Updating the bios on the ASRock board helped, however it was very unstable with some Crucial memory we had at hand. Strangely, we couldn't get a validation for the system build, even at default clock speeds. The system passed stress testing in Prime 95 and Furmark. Overclocking in the bios is straightforward, and ASRock even offer some 'pre configured' settings as shown above. It is worth paying attention to this however as it can force memory out of specification. We managed to push the system to around 3,700mhz, which is a heck of an achievement. As CPUz wouldn't validate the system at reference clocks, we didn't expect validation at these overclocked speeds either. You can however view the CPU-Z link here. To test today we built a system from the ground up with a focus on low cost gaming. We left the system in the overclocked state (3,700mhz). Processor: AMD A8-3850 @ 3.7ghz. Cooling: AMD reference cooler. Graphics: Sapphire HD6870 Twin Fan Overclock Edition. Motherboard: ASRock A75 Extreme 6. Chassis: Silverstone Raven 3. Power Supply: Corsair 750W. Memory: 8GB Kingston @ 1700mhz 9-9-9-24. Storage: Intel 40GB SSD (boot) / Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD. Monitors: Hazro Ultra Sharp HZ230Wi, Dell Ultrasharp U2410 Rev A00. Software: Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit Unigine Heaven Benchmark PCMark 7 3DMark 11 Fraps Professional Steam Client FurMark HQV 2.0 Software Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment: Nikon D3X with R1C1 kit Olympus E-PL1 Keithley Integra unit Thermal Diodes Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter Games: Dirt 3 Far Cry 2 Lost Planet 2 Total War: Shogun 2 Dead Island Call Of Duty: Black Ops All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page. Some game descriptions and information are taken with courtesy from Wikipedia. SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc. Native ports for all major operating systems are available: • Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86) • Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64) • Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64) • Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01) • Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02) All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of: • SMP – Multi-Processor • MC – Multi-Core • SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading • MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions • GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics • NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access • AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86 • IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit Performance results fall in line with what we would expect at these speeds, excellent performance from the A8-3850 at 3.7ghz. Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor. An overall score of 4.23 points is very good, highlighting strong performance gains at this clock speed. 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page. The system scores 4,158 points at the default performance settings which is a very strong result, indicating great gaming potential. PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use. Excellent results from the ASRock system, scoring 3,690 points. The Sapphire discrete solution really helps boost overall performance. Our good friends at Cyberlink kindly supplied the software for our BluRay and conversion tests. Cyberlink PowerDVD 11 is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the Blu-Ray Disc of Avatar. With the Sapphire solution helping to lower CPU load, the system averages around 9 percent, rising to 17 percent a few times. The Matroska Media container is a very popular, open standard Multimedia container which is usually found as .MKV files. It is a very popular format in enthusiast circles and can be played directly in Windows Media Player with suitable codecs installed. We use the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP). We ripped our BluRay disc of Sniper Reloaded to 1080P MKV and use Windows Media Player to playback the file. An intensive test, especially with a high bitrate MKV contained media file. There are still many CPU cycles left over for multitasking, if the need arises. Many people using this system will be enjoying Flash related content so we feel it is important to test with some of the more demanding material available freely online. Full hardware acceleration is enabled. Flash HD playback performance is very impressive, with an average CPU load around 14 percent. CPU time peaked at around 22 percent in this particular test. CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats. Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology. New and Improved Features Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously. Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention. Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices. Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment. Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A. Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier. For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version which has been optimised for Sandybridge processors. A final time of 16 minutes and 34 seconds is very good, especially when we factor in that an Intel ATOM CPU can take over 1 hour and 10 minutes to complete the same task on this source file. To test, we attached a Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD to ascertain SATA 6Gbps performance. A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach to rate the Samsung SSD from the onboard SATA controller. Performance is good, although we couldn't achieve the maximum throughput of this particular drive, regardless of the controller we used. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. ATTO measures performance at around 350 MB/s write and 400 MB/s read. HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection. There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we. This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis. Read our initial analysis over here Sapphire HD6870 Dual Fan Dial 4 Dial with static pattern 5 Gray Bars 5 Violin 5 Stadium 2:2 5 Stadium 3:2 5 Horizontal Text Scroll 5 Vertical Text Scroll 5 Transition to 3:2 Lock 5 Transition to 2:2 Lock 0 2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video 5 2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video 5 3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed 5 5:5 FPS Animation 5 6:4 12 FPS Animation 5 8:7 8 FPS Animation 5 Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP) 5 Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE) 5 Random Noise: Sailboat 5 Random Noise: Flower 5 Random Noise: Sunrise 5 Random Noise: Harbour Night 5 Scrolling Text 5 Roller Coaster 5 Ferris Wheel 5 Bridge Traffic 5 Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text 5 Roller Coaster 5 Ferris Wheel 5 Bridge Traffic 5 Luminance Frequency Bands 5 Chrominance Frequency Bands 5 Vanishing Text 5 Resolution Enhancement 15 Theme Park 5 Driftwood 5 Ferris Wheel 5 Skin Tones 7 Total 196 A score of 196 is in line with previous results from AMD discrete video cards in recent months. Class leading image quality scores. Just Cause is an open world action-adventure video game developed by Avalanche Studios and published by Eidos Interactive. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360 on September 22, 2006 in Europe, September 27, 2006 in North America, September 29, 2006 in Australia and November 8, 2007 in Japan. The fictional area explored during the game is described as being over 250,000 acres (1,012 km2; 391 sq mi) in size, with 21 story missions and over 300 side missions to complete. Very strong overall results, averaging 64 frames per second and dropping to 42 frames per second in a particularly intensive section. Dead Island is set in the fictional island of Banoi, located off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The main characters wake up in the Palms Resort hotel to find the island attacked by zombies and mysteriously, they are immune to whatever is making people into zombies. As they try to find and help other survivors, they must also find a way to escape the island as well. A fun game to play, if a little stupid. This hardware manages to maintain very high frame rates throughout, dropping to 82 fps in a few key locations, such as the beach front. Dirt 3 is a rallying videogame and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters, although the “Colin McRae” tag has been completely removed from this iteration (having been previously been removed from American versions of previous games in the series). We used the Ultra preset for the testing. Dirt 3 is a great racing game and it looks fantastic at these settings. No problems with the frame rate either, maintaining rates over 40 at all times. Call Of Duty: Black Ops has been another huge success story selling millions of copies since it was launched. The player assumes the role of various characters during the single-player campaign, changing perspectives throughout the story. The playable characters are special forces operatives conducting black operations behind enemy lines. In this way, the player's characters have their own traits such as voices and shadows. Each mission features a series of objectives that are displayed on the heads-up display, which marks the direction and distance towards and from such objectives. The player is accompanied by friendly troops throughout the game. Although primarily a first-person shooter, the player pilots a Hind helicopter and guides friendly troops from a SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft. Call Of Duty Black Ops plays well on this ASRock A75 Extreme 6 powered system, scoring an average of over 60 fps. Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2. Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer. Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today. Settings: 1920×1080, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High). A demanding Direct X 10 engine, but no performance issues with the system for review averaging almost 70 frames per second at 1080p. Lost Planet 2 is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. Many gameplay features from the original Lost Planet game are present. Recurring elements include major boss battles, extreme terrain, and the ability to pilot mechanized armor suits, known as Vital Suits (VSs). Lost Planet 2 is a rather boring game to play, but the Direct X 11 engine is a good test of hardware. At 1080p, we get solid frame rates with only one drop below 25 fps. There are a handful of quality motherboards to partner up with the AMD A8-3850 processor, but the ASRock A75 Extreme 6 has proven to be the best overclocker of them all, even when using a standard AMD reference cooler. We achieved 3.7ghz, an overclock of 800mhz. This really helps boost performance when benchmarking. When paired up with a capable, yet cost effective graphics card such as the Sapphire HD6870 Twin Fan overclock Edition we can see that a high performance gaming system need not cost several thousand pounds. Even with Direct X 11 engines, this system had no problem in maintaining solid frame rates. The bios is very well configured and the update procedure can be handled directly from within Windows, always a bonus for inexperienced users who are concerned about potentially messing up their new system. ASRock have helpfully configured the bios with some preconfigured overclock settings, right up to 3.6ghz, taking the pain out of the procedure. ASRock have many fantastic Z68 boards on the market, and their A75 Extreme 6 is one of the best available for the AMD 75 platform. They really are a force to be reckoned with in 2011 and deserve a lot of credit for their continued drive and stellar range of products. Amazon are selling the motherboard in the UK right now for £117.85 inc vat. Pros: Great overclocking board. Bios is well laid out. Many expansion slots. Competitively priced in UK. connectivity is strong. Cons: The appearance is a little dull. A few teething problems with some memory in our testing. Kitguru says: A solid product which overclocks extremely well. ASRock A75 EXTREME6 @ testfreaks.co.uk