 Now I often have people asking me about what's the best gaming motherboard or what's the best platform for gaming or whatever the case may be. What I usually say to them is the best gaming motherboard is the motherboard that has all the features you want and fits all the hardware you want to put on it. But just to demonstrate, I thought I'd take a couple of gaming motherboards and pit them against each other. This is going to be a bit of an examination of the 990FX chipset versus the 890FX chipset. So right here what I have in my hand is a Crosshair 4 formula. You're going to want to come a little closer so I can show you this part as well. And the Crosshair 4 formula is an 890FX board. It's got support for USB 3 via the back panel. It's got an AM3 socket, dual channel DDR3, up to four PCI-E 16X slots, although you're running at 16X and 16X or at 16X884, something along those lines. Yeah, I think that's the deal. We've also got SATA 2. So the 990FX version, the Crosshair 5 formula, has a bit of a sharper aesthetic. All these SATA ports are changed over to SATA 3 6 gigabit per second now. We also have an additional USB 3 front header to go with the four USB 3 back headers. Okay, there's an AM3 plus socket, which means that we'll have support for AMD's bulldozer 8-core CPUs when they are released. So basically, what does that mean in terms of its performance with a current generation processor? So I thought I'd take some of the benchmarks I did before. This is with a 6992 dual graphics video card or dual chip video card. We've got eight gigs of RAM, my usual test bench. And so I thought I'd take my 1100T benchmarks with the 890FX platform and run them against the 990FX to see how it goes. So I'm almost done, and I'll show you guys the results when I'm done. And I think that if you have been following how much of an impact chipsets have on computer performance these days, you probably won't find these results very surprising. All right, so here's my results with the 890FX versus the 990FX chipset. So I'm going to leave off Crysis 2 for now. We're going to return to that. But let's look at the Witcher. So yeah, it performs about 8% better. Dirt 3, the 990FX is a little slower. Fear 3, they're identical. Battlefield Bad Company 2, the 990FX is a little faster. And Civ 5, it's a little faster. So it seems to me the board is slightly faster for gaming, although I can't really say with certainty that these are significantly different enough to be representative of the performance delta because I didn't do a ton of runs. I've had a lot of benchmarking to do this weekend. So this is pretty much within the margin of error for most of them, although Witcher 2, I have very good consistency on that benchmark. I would say that one's definitely out ahead. And Civ 5 is just a late game view, so that one is definitely ahead. And they were distinctly different frame rates. It's 30 constant, 31 constant. So there's not much room for error there. Dirt 3 is a canned benchmark. So once again, although it's a canned benchmark with AI, so it runs a race and sometimes the AI player places differently. So depending on how many cars are in front of it at a time, it could be slightly more or less demanding. Now Crisis 2, this is a funny one because I'm going to have to go back at this because Crisis 2, I ran it with the, when I was originally doing this one with the APU versus the 1100T, I ran it with dual 6970s and I was getting zero scaling on this platform. So I was like, okay, forget it. So that's when I switched to the 6990 for my standardized benchmarking platform. Now I got reasonable scaling with the 6990s, so I was like, oh, okay. Well, I mean, it didn't scale great. It went from like 40 to 49 FPS. And then it, you know, this was appropriate given this, but then all of a sudden, I mean, I rerun this again and I got the same results. So for some reason, this platform performed way better in Crisis 2. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to throw the Crosshair 4 back on the test bench and I'm going to run Crisis 2 again and see what happened because I'm not even reinstalling, I'm not even changing any drivers. I'm changing absolutely nothing about my Windows platform in order to switch between 990 and the FX because they're actually very, very, very similar chipsets. There's almost no difference between them. So let's see what happens here, guys. Well, every once in a while you run into these bizarre things. I just did my run through again and if nothing else, there it is, 49.1. This reassures me that my Crisis 2 run through is fairly consistent. So 49.1 is my new result. So yeah, you see this kind of thing from time to time where a particular setup is a little bit faster in something than another one, even though they should be very similar. So the 990 FX Crosshair 5 formula seems to perform better in Crisis 2 with the 6990 than the Crosshair 4 formula. I suspect it's just a quirk of my particular setup. Like I remember I had one of my old computers. It was like a 939, socket 939 computer. For some reason, never required a password for Warcraft 3. I never had to enter a CD key. Or rather, I never had to enter the CD. So it would run with a no CD even back before that game would do it. And the computer I had before that wouldn't do it and the computer I upgraded to afterwards wouldn't do it. And it was just sort of a quirk of that particular platform. So there you go. So those are my results for the 890 FX versus the 990 FX. I would pretty much call this probably some kind of a weird glitch. But the funny thing is this is like significantly more playable on this platform than like this is a crappy at 50 FPS and this is a good 60. You can really feel it in those drops. So thank you for checking out my video on the Crosshair 5 formula versus the Crosshair 4 formula 990 FX 890 FX. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. And oh yeah, here's that black socket indicating the AM3 Plus compatibility. Very cool stuff. Okay, this is driving me crazy. I'm going to do it one more time. So I put the Crosshair 5 back on the bench. I'm firing up Crysis 2 again. I guess I'll have to restart before I do that. And then yeah, I'm changing absolutely zero game settings. I checked GPU Z. It's running at 16X in this slot, all of that stuff. So let's see what happens. Let's see if I can reproduce these results again. Well I figured it out. Here's my result with the 990 FX. So 50.8. So I can throw this guy out because here's what happened. The 990 FX board is set to the wrong date in the BIOS, which caused my FRAPS results to be out of order because I sorted by date modified in order to make it simple for me to see which is the last benchmark I ran. So the true result, and it must have been my imagination that it was running smoother on here. The true result is around 50 FPS and performance is equivalent. Thank you for your patience. While I sorted out this little technical matter, and I guess thanks for coming along on the ride, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxing reviews and other computer videos.