Seven AMD 785G-Based Motherboards Rounded Up

Features
By
published

Foxconn Cinema Premium: BIOS And Overclocking

A list of voltage and frequency ranges can be found on page 21 of this review.

The Cinema Premium board doesn't pretend to be an enthusiast's tweaker, but it still offers control over a number of relevant enthusiast-oriented settings. Interestingly, the northbridge voltage setting is displayed both in the main voltage and IGP voltage menus. There is no BIOS profile saving feature we could find, unfortunately.

We came across a strange issue that manifested itself in game testing on two out of the three boards in this roundup that offered no SidePort memory: both Left 4 Dead and World in Conflict would crash if the game resolution was changed. This issue was resolved if the amount of shared IGP memory was set manually in the BIOS, so we set it to 512MB.

Image 1 of 2

Like the Biostar board, the Foxconn Cinema Premium claims to have DDR2-1066 compatibility. It succeeded in completing a 3DMark run at this setting with the ADATA 800+ RAM running at 5-7-7-24 latency at 2.0V.

Turning on AMD's ACC feature would unfortunately crash the system with both of our CPU samples, just as it did on the only other DDR2-equipped board in our roundup.

While we were able to boot the system with the IGP overclocked to 1,000 MHz, it would crash during testing even at the maximum northbridge voltage settings allowed. We were successful in achieving a 900 MHz stable overclock with the integrated graphics chipset by setting the BIOS to increase northbridge voltage by +.210mV.

TOPICS
Don Woligroski
36 Comments Comment from the forums
  • JohnnyLucky
    Very informative article. Nice to see there are motherboards with different features for different users/tasks.
    Reply
  • LATTEH
    Just what i needed to see thanks toms!
    Reply
  • bpdski
    Great article, I think this shows pretty conclusively that there is no benefit to upgrading to an AM3 based system. If you already have an AM2+ system, you can easily just drop in a new CPU and you system will be every bit as good as a brand new system with DDR3. You just need to make sure your motherboard supports the power requirements of whatever you want to drop in.
    Reply
  • jonpaul37
    Hooray AMD for having cheap solutions in these hard-economic times!

    Boo @ Intel! i like the product, but my wallet & Girl do not like the cost!
    Reply
  • jonpaul37Hooray AMD for having cheap solutions in these hard-economic times!Boo @ Intel! i like the product, but my wallet & Girl do not like the cost!+1
    Girl has more money for clothes!
    Reply
  • ominous prime
    Well bpdski there is no point upgrading if you're AM2, but if you're building a new PC AM3 is the way to go in terms of your computers longevity. Very informative article.
    Reply
  • sonofliberty08
    thanks alot for the info , my first choice was allways asus , but now i now what i need when im going to unlock core , and now i saw the benefits of sideport memory .
    Reply
  • duzcizgi
    We were successful in achieving a 900 MHz stable overclock with the integrated graphics chipset by setting the BIOS to increase northbridge voltage by +.210mV.
    Well, .210 mV = 210 microvolt. I don't think it would make much of a change. Maybe it is 210 mV or, .210 V. :)
    Reply
  • doron
    "Now we're seeing another benefit for the AM2+/DDR2 boards: both the Foxconn Cinema Premium and Biostar TA785GE 128M are drawing less power than their AM3/DDR3 counterparts."
    How comes? Didn't we all agree a long time ago that ddr3 supposed to be more energy efficient out of the two? (Lower voltage and stuff?)
    Reply
  • DarkMantle
    Great article, this will help a lot of people to make their AMD budget motherboard choice easier, thank you Don.
    Reply