Application Performance
Microsoft Excel is not an AMD friendly benchmark as we have often found. The extra cores of the Phenom II X6 1090T also come into play here leaving the Phenom II X2 555 unlocked configurations trailing. The budget AM3 motherboards all completed the test in 31 seconds resulting in a tie.
Our custom WinRAR test was also used to measure the performance of these budget AM3 motherboards. As you can see the shorter 400MB program compression test saw all three AM3 boards complete the test in 41 seconds making them just a few seconds slower than the more expensive Phenom II X6 1090T and Core i5 750 processors.
The longer single file audio/video compression test did see the unlocked Phenom II X2 555 lag behind. The results of the budget boards were within 4 seconds of one another, close enough to call it a tie.
The last real-world application that we tested these budget motherboards with was Adobe Photoshop CS5. The differences are slim between boards, but the Asrock was the faster of the three, completing the test 2 seconds away from the Core i5 CPU mark.