The ASRock AB350 Gaming K4 Motherboard Review: Dual M.2 at $90
by Gavin Bonshor on April 9, 2018 9:00 AM ESTCPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We put the memory settings at the CPU manufacturers suggested frequency, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v1.0.2: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container: a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short. We also take the third video and transcode it to HEVC. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.4: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2017. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test v2.1: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here. We are using the latest version of 3DPM, which has a significant number of tweaks over the original version to avoid issues with cache management and speeding up some of the algorithms.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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coder543 - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
Isn't it strange to have a whole series of reviews planned for this generation of AMD motherboards right now? A new motherboard (and processor) generation is expected to launch within the next 2 to 3 weeks. This ASRock AB350 should be forwards compatible (with a BIOS update), but wouldn't people buying a new motherboard be better off buying one with a newer chipset from the upcoming generation?But, according to the first page of this article, there are four other motherboards from this same generation with reviews in the works. Just something I find interesting.
The_Assimilator - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
Welcome to AnandTech anno 2018 - so perpetually late with certain reviews that it's often a wonder they bother putting them up. I guess Purch, "The Future of Digital Publishing", can't afford to hire more writers (because they sure as hell can't afford editors worth a damn, as shown by the ever-increasing amount of basic grammar and spelling mistakes in the articles that do get put up).I mean, it's certainly not like Purch bought AnandTech so that they can bleed it dry, then dump it once not even its name is worth anything. Nope. Not at all.
DigitalFreak - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
I really miss Anand.close - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link
These days the only 2 reasons to come here are if you still have some sort of muscle memory (like going to the fridge even if you don't want anything), or pure mistake - you actually wanted ArsTechnica or something like that.Dr. Swag - Wednesday, April 11, 2018 - link
ArsTechnica over Anandtech? Is that a joke? The only thing they win in is timeliness. In everything else, especially CPU and smartphone reviews, Anandtech is WAY more thorough, especially on the benchmark side of things.NesteaZen - Wednesday, April 11, 2018 - link
Oh? He sold the website? I'm not an uber active anandtech readerDr. Swag - Wednesday, April 11, 2018 - link
He sold it to Purch in 2014Lolimaster - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link
They make a intel propaganda site, that's the goal.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link
If you see any errors or typos, please by all means let us know.Time is fleeting and Google cares more about who's first than who's best, so while I always strive to keep quality high, we do have to move quickly to stay relevant.
SlyNine - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link
"A mid-range GPU, no overclock, a discrete graphics card"Not sure if this is an error or not. But it seems a tad redundant to mention GPU and discrete graphics card.