Testing – Futuremark
Next I ran the three newest Futuremark benchmarks, again at stock clock and my overclock.
Testing – Photoshop
Then I ran Photoshop Bench at both clocks. Photoshop Bench, by HardwareHeaven.com (formerly DriverHeaven.net), is a script that runs a series of filters on a large jpg in Photoshop. Photoshop measures how long it takes to run each filter. Actually there are 15 tests in all, but I will only list some of those that take longer to run, it is hard to tell much with a test that only takes a second or two.
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.