Six Socket FM2 Motherboards For AMD's Trinity APUs
Tags:
-
Motherboards
- Socket
- Trinity
-
AMD
Last response: in Reviews comments
After just one generation, Socket FM1 is dead. We test six Socket FM2-based motherboards able to take AMD's newest APUs built using the Trinity architecture. Can any of these platforms, armed with AMD A85X Fusion Controller Hubs, get us to upgrade?
Six Socket FM2 Motherboards For AMD's Trinity APUs : Read more
Six Socket FM2 Motherboards For AMD's Trinity APUs : Read more
More about : socket fm2 motherboards amd trinity apus
Cryio
November 26, 2012 4:16:48 AM
Related resources
- Need Motherboard for AMD A8-5600K Trinity 3.6GHz Socket FM2 - Forum
- can a amd a4-5300 trinity 3.4ghz (3.6ghz turbo) socket fm2 65w dual-core desktop apu (cpu + gpu) with directx 11 graphic amd r - Forum
- Kaveri APUs and the FM2 socket - Forum
- Motherboards I find interesting. (Intel socket 1150 and AMD FM2+) - Forum
- Are FM2+ motherboards compatible with Trinity CPUs? - Forum
SakkuraSneaky, lol. Now he's going to be downvoted.
Not sneaky, I just see a lot of sniping in here. I checked the article and didn't find it, and I really need to find it before I can gripe at the person who made the final revisions to this article. His comment could be completely false for all I know... Score
8
Darkerson
November 26, 2012 7:18:58 AM
buzznutAnd I would penalize Asrock for the brown PCB. Its an otherwise nice looking board, but this is a trend I don't care for.
Penalizing a company over a PCB's color is asinine and petty. Even if you have a case with an acrylic window, do you stare into your PC all day and night? If so, that is trend I don't care for.
There are much more important things to worry about, like quality, price, and features, to name a few...
Score
5
Anonymous
a
b
V
Motherboard
November 26, 2012 8:20:35 AM
Why no GPU OC as has been requested many times? This platform allows easy GPU OC's as mentioned in your previous PD articles.
You still have never posted your 1GHz+ clocked GPU results.
I am also upset that you didn't run the gaming benches with the OCed RAM. I want to know how a PROPERLY configured setup like this could perform.
8% gains approx from going to 1866 over 1600, does higher clocks after this have any effect?
How does OCing the GPU part limit your CPU clock OCs? or is the heat not too bad ?
So many questions unanswered....
You still have never posted your 1GHz+ clocked GPU results.
I am also upset that you didn't run the gaming benches with the OCed RAM. I want to know how a PROPERLY configured setup like this could perform.
8% gains approx from going to 1866 over 1600, does higher clocks after this have any effect?
How does OCing the GPU part limit your CPU clock OCs? or is the heat not too bad ?
So many questions unanswered....
Score
14
americanbrianWhy no GPU OC as has been requested many times? This platform allows easy GPU OC's as mentioned in your previous PD articles. You still have never posted your 1GHz+ clocked GPU results. I am also upset that you didn't run the gaming benches with the OCed RAM. I want to know how a PROPERLY configured setup like this could perform.8% gains approx from going to 1866 over 1600, does higher clocks after this have any effect?How does OCing the GPU part limit your CPU clock OCs? or is the heat not too bad ? So many questions unanswered....
These sound like great ideas for a platform-oriented story. In fact, Thomas and I have discussed doing a piece on memory and Trinity. Maybe we could expand that to include an exploration of graphics and processor bottlenecks, too. Thanks for the feedback!
Score
14
silverblue
November 26, 2012 11:59:22 AM
silverblue
November 26, 2012 12:08:10 PM
buzznutAnd I would penalize Asrock for the brown PCB. Its an otherwise nice looking board, but this is a trend I don't care for.
Well, in days gone by we'd have had green or gold boards. To be perfectly honest though, unless you're going to have a side window, you're not likely to care about the PCB colour. I'm far more interested in features and performance than the aesthetics, personally.
Score
7
buzznutAnd I would penalize Asrock for the brown PCB. Its an otherwise nice looking board, but this is a trend I don't care for.
I thought that the brown PCB meshed decently with the black and grey color scheme utilized by most of the rest of the board. Hey, at least it doesn't look like those ugly low end FoxConn boards
Score
5
bentonsl_2010
November 26, 2012 2:08:41 PM
CrashmanWhy don't you point to where you see that?
Here is a relevant quote from a randomly-googled article:
Longtime Elder Scrolls fans hoping Skryim would take full advantage of the PC's strengths: unfortunately we have to disappoint you. Game director Todd Howard says besides higher quality textures and bigger resolutions, it "looks the same" as on consoles, and it's "mostly a DirectX 9 game in terms of how the shaders work."
He does note DirectX 11 support is a possibility down the line, however: "When it comes to DirectX 11 there are things they get us for free, like performance gains. You’re going to get performance gains out of it versus an older version. But the specifics DX11 does, like tessellation and all that kinda stuff, we aren’t taking advantage of that right now. That doesn’t mean we won’t in the future. We aren’t right now because we want to author it so it looks great.”
On the bright side, the new engine means Skyrim looks quite lovely as is, just nothing mind-blowing, which it could be. No doubt the modding community will improve the situation before long, though.
Score
-3
Bentonsl_2010Here is a relevant quote from a randomly-googled article:Longtime Elder Scrolls fans hoping Skryim would take full advantage of the PC's strengths: unfortunately we have to disappoint you. Game director Todd Howard says besides higher quality textures and bigger resolutions, it "looks the same" as on consoles, and it's "mostly a DirectX 9 game in terms of how the shaders work."He does note DirectX 11 support is a possibility down the line, however: "When it comes to DirectX 11 there are things they get us for free, like performance gains. You’re going to get performance gains out of it versus an older version. But the specifics DX11 does, like tessellation and all that kinda stuff, we aren’t taking advantage of that right now. That doesn’t mean we won’t in the future. We aren’t right now because we want to author it so it looks great.”On the bright side, the new engine means Skyrim looks quite lovely as is, just nothing mind-blowing, which it could be. No doubt the modding community will improve the situation before long, though.
He wasn't asking for proof of what DX is utilized by Skyrim, he was asking where in the article was it claimed that Skyrim used DX11.
Score
6
unempit
November 26, 2012 2:42:39 PM
OnusThat 16C over ambient on the ASRock board is a little worrisome. That looks like the only real outlier in all the measurements. Was that at stock clocks, or with the OC?As far as performance goes, there doesn't appear to be any difference worth noting (which I'd expect).
Stock clocks. I think you'll be OK so long as your room isn't over...60C? No computing in saunas? Score
4
Teslarifle
November 26, 2012 4:52:07 PM
$210 for board+CPU combo that doesn't play Skyrim well on any sort of reasonable settings. Assume adding something like a 7850 2GB for better gaming performance. Contrast that with $270 for a 2500k+ASRock board, same 7850, and you are going to blow away the performance of the A10 in every single benchmark and probably run any modern game at max settings. There is no reason anyone should be an AMD APU for gaming, period.
Score
1
Teslarifle$210 for board+CPU combo that doesn't play Skyrim well on any sort of reasonable settings. Assume adding something like a 7850 2GB for better gaming performance. Contrast that with $270 for a 2500k+ASRock board, same 7850, and you are going to blow away the performance of the A10 in every single benchmark and probably run any modern game at max settings. There is no reason anyone should be an AMD APU for gaming, period.
It's not a high-end nor even a mid-ranged option... Honestly, I wouldn't put any of these boards in an APU system. I reserve APU systems mostly for very low-budget entry level gaming systems and I tend to throw in one of the cheapest boards around for that (IE $40-60, ASRock had an awesome deal for a decent A75 board at $40 a while ago and it as perfect for such systems).
For example, an A10-5800K with the ASRock FM2A75M-DGS and Xigmatek Gaia cooler can be had for a mere $~195. That's a decent CPU, entry-level GPU, and entry-level motherboard with a cooler for some minor to moderate overclocking. Throw in an Antec VP-450 that can be had as cheap as ~$32 and a cheap case such as the Rosewill Redbone/Blackbone U3 or RoseWill challenger (can be had as cheap as $25-45 depending on deals, at least one of them is usually around $30) and you almost have an entire computer for a little over $250. All you need at that point is a storage drive or two (can be had for around $40-60 each), possibly also an optical disk drive (which can usually be had for about $10 thanks to combo deals from Newegg with many Rosewill cases) and all that's left is memory. A decent DDR3-1600-2133 8GB kit can usually be had for $30-45 and you can spend less than $300-350 for an entire entry-level gaming machine.
Not everyone has the money to spend on a mid-ranged to high end system. If this is all that someone can afford, a very common situation, then it is what that someone is likely to consider buying. Good luck making a similarly performing Intel system for less money. Oh, and don't bother with a Pentium or Celeron, it turns out that they're almost as good as i3s in synthetic comparisons, but a real world comparison leaves them being junk compared to even low-end AMD triple and quad core models:
discrete gaming performance with Radeon 7950 800MHz Catalyst 12.3:

Even the best Pentium, the Pentium G2120, can't touch AMD's Athlon II x4-comparable models such as the Llano A8s and Phenom II x4 850 in real-world performance (the FPS was calculated in average frame latency instead of average FPS for a more accurate representation of the experience's smoothness than FPS can provide and granted it's still not perfect, it's much closer to perfection than measuring in average FPS). You'd also have to throw in at least a Radeon 6670 DDR3 or similarly performing discrete graphics card for the Intel systems because their IGPs can't keep up.
Score
2
Score
4
wislam
November 26, 2012 5:50:10 PM
Many thanks for a great review and one which I've been waiting for quite a while since the release of Trinity!
Once again it shows me that performance is pretty much identical between the boards, the only difference really being the overclockability and power consumption... the latter of which I value the most.
It would have been great if you could have included mATX and perhaps even some ITX boards in there - not sure how many people buy full (fat) ATX over mATX?
It would have also been beneficial to see some SATA performance testing.
Once again it shows me that performance is pretty much identical between the boards, the only difference really being the overclockability and power consumption... the latter of which I value the most.
It would have been great if you could have included mATX and perhaps even some ITX boards in there - not sure how many people buy full (fat) ATX over mATX?
It would have also been beneficial to see some SATA performance testing.
Score
3
wislam...It would have been great if you could have included mATX and perhaps even some ITX boards in there - not sure how many people buy full (fat) ATX over mATX?It would have also been beneficial to see some SATA performance testing.
Yeah I'm with you on that mATX/ITX part of the comment. These are budget chips and when I built a system around the A8-3870K chip, I looked for the cheapest mATX board I could find. It just makes more sense for the platform.
Score
2
falchard
November 26, 2012 8:12:06 PM
I think based on the benchmark, MSI is the clear balance between price and performance. Its performance numbers nearly match ASUS while offering a price close to the ASROCKs. However in a test like this where in every category its dead even, its down to how cool the peripherals are. I think this is where MSI comes ahead. The Black SATA cables with White tips and full labeled I/O panel gives it an edge over the competition.
They also decided to make a more Stable system then one that tries to mask power consumption.
They also decided to make a more Stable system then one that tries to mask power consumption.
Score
1
jesh4622
November 26, 2012 11:15:01 PM
I definitely agree on itx/matx. The situations where this CPU makes sense all could work with a smaller form factor. By extension, what I'd love to see is a large itx/matx roundup with undervolting/underclocking comparisons and GPU overclocks ESPECIALLY on the 65w TDP processors across the lineup; A4, A6 and A8 reviews with undervolting are impossible to find. With 2133mhz ram easily affordable, I don't know why Trinity is always benched with 1600.
Score
4
mayankleoboy1
November 27, 2012 1:32:39 AM
mayankleoboy1these articles comparing same socket mobos get a little boring. 90% of the benchies are the same (as they would be). And the 10% is the difference in peripheral connectivity and some on-board features.
They show a good comparison of boards for a given platform. Boring to you or not, they are often among the most useful articles on the site to the most people.
Score
2
mayankleoboy1
November 27, 2012 3:27:10 AM
blazorthonThey show a good comparison of boards for a given platform. Boring to you or not, they are often among the most useful articles on the site to the most people.
from the number of comments, doesnt seem like many people are interested.
Or maybe its just that Trinity is meh for most , except you, who has been quoting the same techreport article on every AMD story for some time now. I know its personally painful to you, but AMD is doomed.
Score
-5
mayankleoboy1from the number of comments, doesnt seem like many people are interested.Or maybe its just that Trinity is meh for most , except you, who has been quoting the same techreport article on every AMD story for some time now. I know its personally painful to you, but AMD is doomed.
Couldn't think of a good argument, so you went down to mockery and going off on a tangent that doesn't really correlate to your earlier post. That's real nice of you.
First off, I'll start by saying that you didn't specify FM2 as the socket in your earlier post, you specified same-socket round-ups and like I said, they're more important than comparing boards from different sockets because they give a clear comparison of some of the best options for a given platform. Changing your meaning to strictly FM2 changes nothing of that and using that as a personal attack against me only weakens your argument even more.
The number of comments here is irrelevant to the point that I made and what you said afterwards doesn't add to the discussion. The same is true for the number of readers regardless of whether or not they commented here.
It's not my fault that that Tech Report article is one of the only articles which measured performance properly. Furthermore, I've actually used it much more often to explain how an i3 is much better than a Pentium in real-world gaming performance than I have for arguments supporting AMD.
Whether or not I like AMD's current track is irrelevant to any point that I make about the performance except those that are explaining my opinion of it, which are far fewer than simply explaining the performance situation.
AMD being doomed should be personally painful to any and all computer enthusiasts because it could spell doom for much of the rest of the industry. We've already seen how Nvidia is willing to significantly cut corners and how Intel's improvements in performance have slowed almost to a halt and this is all with AMD around. I can't imagine the situation getting better without AMD. Without AMD, both would probably also be open to anti-trust and other such lawsuits, especially Intel, so even AMD's competitors may be screwed by AMD going under.
Trinity is generally the best CPU/GPU option for most entry-level gaming systems and is a great option for lower mid-ranged overclocking builds. Whether or not a site that is not mostly used by low-end gamers who read such articles as this has many comments on such an article doesn't entirely support your claims either because you've taken out the most important elements from your consideration, the human elements. You didn't consider the fact that most people who would use a Trinity system aren't prowling the articles and even better, many of the boards tested here aren't ideal for most Trinity users anyway because they're mostly too expensive.
I could go on, but it doesn't seem worth the effort.
Score
2
lunyoneI would like to see an Intel IGPU (2500, 3000, 4000) system on the charts with these. This would show where they stand compared to AMD's setup. We know that if you add a dedicated GPU to an Intel system you will more than likely beat out some/most of AMD's offerings if you gaming.
Under ~$350, Trinity generally beats Intel in system build budget entry-level gaming systems in both gaming performance and general power consumption. Adding a discrete card increases price and that's not something that you have a lot of room for in the very low budgets. Intel's main advantage over AMD in gaming performance comes in with the cheapest i5s because otherwise, AMD is keeping up fairly well in stock gaming performance at a given price point, especially in many modern games with heavy multi-player usage that eats many threads (Metro 2033 and BF3 MP are two great examples).
Score
2
Quote:
Under ~$350, Trinity generally beats Intel in system build budget entry-level gaming systems in both gaming performance and general power consumption. Adding a discrete card increases price and that's not something that you have a lot of room for in the very low budgets. Intel's main advantage over AMD in gaming performance comes in with the cheapest i5s because otherwise, AMD is keeping up fairly well in stock gaming performance at a given price point, especially in many modern games with heavy multi-player usage that eats many threads (Metro 2033 and BF3 MP are two great examples).I know this, but by how much? It would be easy to add an Intel iGPU to the bottom of the chart, so those not informed too well can see what they would get if they bought just the Intel CPU/GPU (mainly for references sake).
Score
0
lunyoneI know this, but by how much? It would be easy to add an Intel iGPU to the bottom of the chart, so those not informed too well can see what they would get if they bought just the Intel CPU/GPU (mainly for references sake).
Estimating here, but I'd say that the A10s with DDR3-1866 9-9-9-24 or thereabouts will be something like two to four times faster than Intel's HD 4000 in most situations. Suffice to say that the difference is huge even if you ignore Intel's crappy drivers. CPU performance of the i3s is a good deal higher in gaming, but can be met and even exceeded with overclocking. Sorry, but I'm not aware of any article (at least not one that is up to date with drivers and such for both companies) that directly compares them for a more specific and potentially more accurate comparison.
Thanks to a deal on a Radeon 6670 GDDR5, now and for a short time only, an Intel i3 build may be doable that truly bests Trinity at about $350 or less, but otherwise, Trinity wins by either huge margins at the same cost or comparable performance to somewhat higher price points with Intel. It's not a huge price advantage, only a few dozen dollars at the most, but it's something.
Score
1
mayankleoboy1
November 27, 2012 7:14:31 AM
butremor
November 27, 2012 7:49:15 AM
butremorGreat article, but would like to see one about A55 and A75 boards.
15 months ago:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/llano-apu-a75-mothe...
Score
0
Crashman15 months ago:http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,3008.html
I only see A75 boards there. I'm not particularly interested in A55 boards, but do you have a review of them since butremor seems interested?
Also, thanks for the link. Any chance of a more up to date version being done with some of those boards and/or with any newer boards that have come out since then?
EDIT: Also, considering this A85X review, would you mind if I asked at what price would you consider going A75 over a more expensive A85X board? Much of their feature sets seem to overlap so much that I'm not sure of where it really matters or if it's even worth getting an A85 board over a cheaper A75 board. Honestly, I'm mostly leaning towards A75 strictly because of price, but I'd appreciate other opinions to compare against and see if I'm missing anything.
Score
1
I have the A8-3870K on an A75 board. It's clocked at 3.4ghz with 1600mhz cas 9 ram. Just reporting on the feel of it from the cpu-side, my old C2Q6600 at any speed feels snappier. It doesn't 'feel' like a quadcore at all, 2 at best, but usually feels a lot more like the really old mobile Athlon 64 4000+ in my 7 yr old laptop a lot of times. That's all cpu-specific stuff and 'feelings'. Gaming is just fine... like dirt 3, 1080p, 2x aa, medium settings and pumping out 30+ fps (dirt 3 is a weak example, i know).
Score
1
silverblue
November 27, 2012 4:15:03 PM
There's another thing we need to consider with Trinity. Resonant Clock Mesh appears to work optimally at about 3.3GHz and drops off a little towards approx. 4GHz... but is pretty ineffective at 2.3-2.5GHz, which, ironically, is where the top mobile Trinity sits.
I know that SA concluded that the A10-4600M is two-thirds the performance of the 5800K at one-third of the power, but I'm left wondering that maybe if RCM performs better the higher you go (to a point), perhaps, AMD could've clocked the A10-4600M a bit higher for essentially free performance.
In a rather long winded way, I would be very interested in seeing how an A10-5800K performs and how much it consumes if you were to downclock it in say, 200MHz steps. I've seen Hexus' review of the A10-5700 and the fact that it performs closely to the 5800K yet significantly undercuts even the A8-5600K as regards power consumption, so I'm wondering how much of this is down to the RCM and how much is down to simply having a better chip than the 5800K.
I know that SA concluded that the A10-4600M is two-thirds the performance of the 5800K at one-third of the power, but I'm left wondering that maybe if RCM performs better the higher you go (to a point), perhaps, AMD could've clocked the A10-4600M a bit higher for essentially free performance.
In a rather long winded way, I would be very interested in seeing how an A10-5800K performs and how much it consumes if you were to downclock it in say, 200MHz steps. I've seen Hexus' review of the A10-5700 and the fact that it performs closely to the 5800K yet significantly undercuts even the A8-5600K as regards power consumption, so I'm wondering how much of this is down to the RCM and how much is down to simply having a better chip than the 5800K.
Score
1
army_ant7
November 28, 2012 5:33:08 AM
blazorthon said:
...Oh, and don't bother with a Pentium or Celeron, it turns out that they're almost as good as i3s in synthetic comparisons, but a real world comparison leaves them being junk compared to even low-end AMD triple and quad core models:discrete gaming performance with Radeon 7950 800MHz Catalyst 12.3:
http://techreport.com/r.x/desktop-trinity/trinity-99th-discrete.png
Even the best Pentium, the Pentium G2120, can't touch AMD's Athlon II x4-comparable models such as the Llano A8s and Phenom II x4 850 in real-world performance (the FPS was calculated in average frame latency instead of average FPS for a more accurate representation of the experience's smoothness than FPS can provide and granted it's still not perfect, it's much closer to perfection than measuring in average FPS).
mayankleoboy1 said:
Took the bait
Score
0
clonazepamI have the A8-3870K on an A75 board. It's clocked at 3.4ghz with 1600mhz cas 9 ram. Just reporting on the feel of it from the cpu-side, my old C2Q6600 at any speed feels snappier. It doesn't 'feel' like a quadcore at all, 2 at best, but usually feels a lot more like the really old mobile Athlon 64 4000+ in my 7 yr old laptop a lot of times. That's all cpu-specific stuff and 'feelings'. Gaming is just fine... like dirt 3, 1080p, 2x aa, medium settings and pumping out 30+ fps (dirt 3 is a weak example, i know).
It feels different, if for any reason at all, because it is a slower per core CPU than the Q6600 by a little and despite higher memory bandwidth, it shares it's memory bandwidth with a GPU. That doesn't make it any less of a quad core CPU whatsoever.
Score
0
- 1 / 2
- 2
- Newest
Related resources
- SolvedGood Motherboard for AMD A10 6800k FM2 socket Forum
- Does P4 478 socket heatsink converts for a10 trinity FM2 socket? Forum
- Amd trinity APUs arrived! Forum
- AMD Trinity APUs Have Arrived Forum
- SolvedQuestion about AMD A6-5400k trinity FM2 Forum
- SolvedIs the FX-6300 compatible with FM2+ Socket Motherboards? Forum
- Safe to buy FM2 motherboard for future APUs? Forum
- SolvedATX Motherboard Socket FM2 Under £50 Forum
- SolvedCorsair H80i...Will it work on an FM2 AMD socket? Forum
- SolvedComparing 990fx vs FM2 AMD motherboards Forum
- SolvedWill the MSI A88XM-E45 Motherboard Fit a FM2 socket, and a A-Series CPU 6800k Forum
- SolvedLooking to a motherboard FM2+ socket that supports dual PCIe 3.0 at x16. Forum
- SolvedCan a FM2 or FM2+ CPU fit in a AM3 or AM3+ socket of a motherboard? Forum
- Do socket FM2 CPUs work on FM2+ MOTHERBOARDS? Forum
- AMD FM2+ socket CPU upgradeability Forum
- More resources
!