Gaming
The games I normally use for testing video cards are just too VGA intensive for integrated graphics, as advanced as they’ve become. So I picked up a couple of games that could actually be played on this rig with some satisfaction. We’re still not going to see 50+ FPS, there will be some choppy moments, but it will be a much better gaming experience that you’d get with an “off the shelf” HP/Compaq/Emachines/Dell/etc.
Left4 Dead 2 is a DX9 FPS that was released late last year. Though the graphics are pretty good, it isn’t that VGA intensive at lower settings. I recorded a 90 second video at The Waterfront with FRAPS, settings were medium, no AA, 1280 x 1024.
Far Cry 2 is an FPS somewhat similar to the extremely popular Far Cry, but takes place in Africa rather than on a tropical island. Supporting both DX9 and DX10, it was released in late 2008. With DX10 I expect it to be a little more VGA intensive than Left 4 Dead 2 and may be pretty choppy with this rig. I used the “Ranch Medium” onboard benchmark, settings were medium, no AA, 1280 x 1024.
No overclocking of the NB, which (as we all should know) has an enormous effect on the performance of an OC’d AMD CPU. No overclocking of the on-board video. No comparison with the HD4200, which this system is supposed to be faster than… and usually isn’t.
I have this board, I have good luck with unlocking both cores of my 550BE. I’ve had really bad luck with fglrx driver stability under KDE, but I’m not the only one. I’ve finally reached stability using fglrx 10.6/10.7 (AMD couldn’t make up their mind which version it was, it was labeled as both point six and point seven on their website and the internal documentation, such is their attention to detail). Word is that 10.8 re-introduces KDE incompatibilities so I haven’t tried it.
Except for that and the occasional KIO crash when using USB 2.0 this board makes a good cheap Linux system with some future-proofing for the USB3 and SATA3 features (I’m using neither at the moment). If AMD would only adjust to the fact that KMS drivers are here and modern Linux desktops use ALL the fade effects and they are expected to work, this would actually be a very nice alternative to buying an Nvidia card for every Linux system built. As it is they are almost there. Maybe. Just fix fglrx, like all of it.