ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO and M4A785TD-M EVO AM3 Motherboards Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

To see just what kind of impact those wonderful overclocks and performance tweaks made, we ran through a small suite of synthetic benchmarks.


SuperPi Mod v1.5

When running the SuperPI 1M benchmark, we are calculating Pi to one million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system. Rather than timing the 32M process, which is frequently used for testing stability, we’ll stick with the 1M test that is more familiar to benchmarkers.


Unlike most modern benchmarks, SuperPI is not multi-threaded. It favors raw number crunching, single core efficiency. Memory performance does play a role in SPI results. As expected, the 4GHz dual core configuration comes ahead.


PCMark Vantage X64

The latest iteration of the popular system benchmark is PCMark Vantage from the Futuremark crew. The PCMark series has always been a great way to either test specific areas of a system or to get a general over view of how your system is performing. For our results, we stuck with the TV and Movies test suite, which is taxing on the CPU and RAM.


Clearly a multi-threaded test, PCMark Vantage “TV and Movies” greatly favors the quad-core configuration. The boost from two extra cores is not linear, however. The 900MHz overclock in a 2-core configuration didn’t buy a whole lot of extra points surprisingly.


Cinebench R10 64-Bit

Developed by MAXON, creators of Cinema 4D, Cinebench 10 is designed using the popular Cinema software and created to compare system performance in 3D Animation and Photo applications. There are two parts to the test; the first stresses only the primary CPU or Core, the second, makes use of up to 16 CPUs/Cores. Both are done rendering a realistic photo while utilizing various CPU-intensive features such as reflection, ambient occlusion, area lights and procedural shaders. For our testing today, we’ll be using the multi-core rendering option only.


Unlike PCMark Vantage “TV and Movies”, boosts in CPU clock speed can make a significant difference in Cinebench. Performance with additional cores increases linearly as workload is evenly distributed across all cores. What an incredible performance boost due entirely to overclocking and unlocking!


Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02 – Zlib Compression

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all benchmarkers or overclockers. With the ability to pick up most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms on your desktop. In addition to this, the memory benchmarking utility provides a useful tool of measuring the changes to your memory sub-system. To test processing horsepower, we ran the Zlib compression test, which is hard on both the CPU and memory subsystems.


In the Zlib compression benchmark, we see an almost identical trend to Cinebench. More cores can’t be beat in terms of additional computing horsepower in a multi-threaded scenario like this.