ASRock Vision 3D 137B Review

Vision 3D 137B Overclocking

The ASRock BIOS might feature some tasty overclocking tools but the cooler isn't built to handle it. As the performance greedy chums we are, the first thing we tried was the 3GHz option of the EasyOC menu. This worked, but only just, as the fan roared to its fastest 4,800rpm and the CPU idled at 60-65^OC with the motherboard idling at 50-55^OC.

Under load, the CPU hit over 85^OC (see below), so we clocked it back to the highest overclock possible while using no extra voltage, and decent 2.7GHz. This overclock still gave the same high temperatures as before, but the fan was now a much quieter as it span at 2,300rpm. This still didn't prevent the system from failing our Media Benchmarks and the CPU from hitting 85^OC though. At just 300MHz over stock speed, any lower overclock is frankly not really worth it.


We also couldn't overclock the Nvidia GeForce GT 425M. Despite the fact that we believe the core should be able to overclock quite significantly if it's anything like the GF104 and GF106 parts, we observed the GPU topping 90^OC at stock speed during our games tests below. This was still fully stable, but obviously there's little to no cooling overhead available for extra performance.

Gaming Performance: Best Playable Settings

Since we've not tested a GF108 part yet, and it's not easily extracted from its special confines within the ASRock Vision 3D system, we've opted to find the best playable settings so you know the gaming capacity of the system as a whole.

As we said before, the GT 425M has 96 stream processors - half the number of latest GeForce GTS 450 - and it uses standard DDR3 memory, rather than fancier and faster GDDR5. Despite being a '1080p' machine when it comes to video playback, it doesn't follow through on the gaming front, so we aimed for 720p (1,280 x 720), but with a weighting towards as much visual candy as we could add rather than resolution.

Crysis: Can it play Crysis? In a word, uh, no. We had to drop the settings down to Medium at 1280x720 under DirectX 10 mode which gave us an average of 28fps but with a desperately low minimum of just 12fps. We begrudgingly dropped the resolution to 1,024 x 768 but that only gave us an extra 3-4fps, which wasn't much of an improvement.


Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: At 1,920 x 1,080 with the settings maxed and using 4x AA we could play the game, but with smoke enabled it become choppy. Dropping to 0x AA or 1,680 x 1,050 with 4x AA provided a smooth gameplay experience.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2: We managed to eek out 1,680 x 1,050 with a high level of detail and textures, but had to use Medium shadows and Effects with no AA, AF or HBAO to make the game jitter-free.


Mafia II: At 1,280 x 720 with 0x AA, 0x AF and no Ambient Occlusion, but with High Detail and Geometry and CPU PhysX, we achieved a stable average frame rate of about 35fps.


STALKER: Call of Pripyat: With DirectX 11 and tessellation enabled on the 'High' pre-set, but with SSAO disabled, we could play smoothly at 1,680 x 1,050 with 0x AA. To get the game to run with its Maximum settings we had to drop the resolution down to 1,280 x 720, then all worked well.