ASRock 880G Extreme3 & 890FX Deluxe3

BIOS:

Like other ASRock motherboards, both the 880G Extreme3 and 890FX Deluxe3 utilize a BIOS from American Megatrends Inc. The set of options within the AMI BIOS is pretty common to other recently reviewed ASRock motherboards, including the ability to save user default settings, adjust the CPU/RAM/HT/PCIE voltages, CPU/HT overclocking, CPU/motherboard thermal monitoring, and voltage and fan speed monitoring, along with other options like Turbo 50 overclocking, and mGPU overclocking for the 880G.

Linux Compatibility:

Installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel to the ASRock 880G Extreme3 proved to not be difficult at all with it just working smoothly out-of-the-box and the Catalyst driver found within the Ubuntu Lucid repository provides proper OpenGL acceleration. If using the open-source driver with this hardware there is basic Mesa DRI acceleration and kernel mode-setting support. Unfortunately, however, the Linux experience with the ASRock 890FX Deluxe3 was not quite as smooth. When attempting to boot the Ubuntu 10.04 LiveCD off this AMD 890FX motherboard the system would indefinitely hang and then trying to boot the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation from the 880G hard drive resulted in an indefinite hang as well right after the GRUB2 boot-loader. Changing BIOS settings and Ubuntu boot-time settings did not end up helping out the situation. However, next an Ubuntu 10.10 snapshot was tested with the Linux 2.6.35 kernel. This time around everything worked just fine.

We already have graphics benchmarks from the 880G Extreme3 motherboard in our Radeon HD 4250 Linux article where we compared its performance to an 890GX motherboard and a discrete ATI Radeon HD graphics card. Within this article we have the rest of the benchmarks looking at the overall system performance between it and the MSI 890GXM-G65 motherboard. As we carried out the 890GX and 880G testing under Ubuntu 10.04 LTS prior to learning of the 890FX Deluxe3 motherboard failing to work well with this stable Long-Term Support release, the 890FX Deluxe3 results from Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" are not within this article but we are looking at those results for another article, but nevertheless those results do indicate the Linux performance is on-par once that motherboard was loaded up with Ubuntu 10.10 and the newer 2.6.35 kernel.

With the MSI 890GXM-G65 and ASRock 880G Extreme3 we were running an AMD Athlon II X3 425 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 system memory, a 250GB Seagate ST3250310AS SATA HDD, and an ATI Radeon HD graphics. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was running with the x86_64 2.6.32 kernel, GNOME 2.30.0 desktop, X.Org Server 1.7.6, Catalyst 10.6, GCC 4.4.3, and an EXT4 file-system. We found no significant performance differences between the 880G and 890GX motherboards when looking at other areas of the Linux desktop performance, but some of the test results are included. These test results include Loopback TCP Network Performance, Apache, PostgreSQL, C-Ray, LZMA compression, x264, Himeno, PostMark, and Unpack-Linux.