The ASUS F1 A75-V EVO Overclocking Experience
Speaking of overclocking, the ASUS F1A75-V EVO has several different methods you can use to achieve a stable overclock. The easiest method by far is to simply flip the TPU switch on the board. This will give you a small, but stable boost in performance based on the APU installed. I recommend this if you have a A6-3670K or A8-3870K as these chips have unlocked multipliers to be overclocked independent of the rest of your system.
The second way is also an automated system which you will find in the AI Tweaker under the UEFI Advanced Mode. As you are probably thinking (or not), this mode will set the voltage of your chip to just under maximum recommended tolerance and gradually move up the multiplier. After a set of stability tests, it repeats until it finds the maximum overclock. This is a good way to test your chip’s potential, but can sometimes end up using more power than needed to reach an overclock. Something to think about if your goal was to build a power efficient system.
Finally, you have the good old fashion manual overclock. If this is your preferred method I suggest you set the UEFI BIOS to start in Advanced Mode. You will find everything you need under the AI Tweaker tab. I will not be including overclocking figures in the test results as I am using a different APU than what is optimal. I will say that using the TPU feature overclocked an A8-3870K to 3.3 GHz and set the GPU to Turbo Boost (800 MHz core speed) with no change in voltage settings. Your mileage may vary of course, but it is worth noting just how easily the ASUS made this look.
Overall System Performance (PCMark07)
As usual, we’ll be starting with PCMark07 and a total system performance break down. PCMark07 provides a very comprehensive set of real world simulations to gauge performance. Results show a variety of categories and can often comparatively show weaknesses in a system. This time I am also including the F1A75-V EVO when EPU is enabled.
Considering the test system for the GIGABYTE 990FX-UD3 was an FX-8150 with an HD 6850 graphics card, the F1A75-V EVO has a strong showing here. I was a little disappointed in the performance when EPU mode is enabled. Across the board there is a near 50% drop. Lets take a close look at what is being affected.
Synthetic Graphical Performance (3DMark11)
This test, as you know, will be testing the general expected performance of the system when playing a full screen 3D game. I have also included the results from two other FM1 motherboards, but please note that the APU’s and BIOS/software have received a few updates since the tests were run. To keep the test fair I limited the A8-3870K to 2.9 GHz and the GPU to the stock speed of 600 MHz with boost disabled.
Clearly the driver update has improved the performance of the on-die GPU by a huge margin. Even when EPU mode is enabled, the F1A75-V EVO cruises past the competition. Also you should note while there is a drop in performance, I am curious as to whether it is caused by the CPU or GPU side.
Real World Graphical Performance (Alien Vs. Predator, Resident Evil 5)
In this test we are going to put the F1 A75-V EVO through its paces with a real world gaming test. As always, the AvP benchmark is done with the default settings with DX11 mode enabled, tessellation on, with high detail at 1920 x 1080. Resident Evil 5 is tested at maxed settings with frame rate unlocked and Vsync disabled with the same screen resolution.
These results provide a little more incite into what the EVO mode is doing. As both of these benchmarks are low threaded games, the CPU has less of effect. This means even with EPU enabled the HD6550D on-die GPU is running at full speed. It would also appear that the CPU is also running at full speed most of the time with no change in performance. Also note the driver updates seem to be limited to improving the performance of DX11 titles.
SATA 6 Gbps I/O Performance (CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 and ATTO Disk Benchmark)
One of the primary purposes of any motherboard is to get the information from the disk drive to the CPU. The faster the better. Now we will be testing the performance of the F1A75-V EVO’s implementation of the FCH I/O. The first test will be the SSD performance. Here I am going to include the numbers from the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD3 again as it is an AMD 990FX board within a similar price range.
As you can see the F1A75-V EVO easily matches the UD3 in write performance with Sequential writes actually being 10 MB/s faster at peek speed. The Read performance is also virtually the same with the 4K random reads with 32 queue depth being the odd man out. There is a distinct drop in performance of 26.3 MB/s here.
Next I will re-run the test focused on a mechanical drive instead of an SSD. This test will include results from the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD3 and the ASRock A75-ITX boards. This should give you an idea of how the F1 A75-V EVO stands up to similarly price boards on a similar platform.
Here the ASUS F1 A75-V EVO falls behind by a little in all of the tests except for sequential tests. Only the Random 512K read test concerns me as there is a 10 MB/s difference; however, the same can be said of both of the sequential tests with the F1 A75-V EVO holding a similar lead over the others.