A Closer Look
The M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 sports AMD’s brand new 890GX chipset and the also new SB850 Southbridge. Some things haven’t changed about the setup, AMD found no need to change their bi-directional HyperTransport 3.0 bus from the NB to the CPU, and continued use of the 2GB/s A-link Express III NB-SB interface. Both the NB and SB retain the features found in their earlier brethren, the 785G and the 790GX.
The 890GX is for AM3 only, so forget about digging out that old AM2+ processor or DDR2 memory. I find it pretty funny…here we are, well over three years after the release of DDR3 system memory and at the doorstep of the release of DDR4 modules, and many AMD users are still mad about Socket AM3 systems being unable to use DDR2 memory. Indeed, only sometime this year did the sale of DDR3 memory overtake DDR2 memory sales. (to be fair, I guess that there are some Intel users that are mad too, but the architecture of LGA 1366 and LGA 1156 CPUs won’t allow for DDR2 memory use)
There are definitely new features found here. USB 3.0 is connected to the CPU via its own 500MB/s PCI-E lane. The SB 850 natively supports SATA 6GB/s, which is fully backwards compatible for the mechanical hard drives that most of us will be connecting to the M4A89GTD Pro/USB3. AMD would like to point out that that the Intel H55 and H57 boards, which AMD feels are comparable to the 890GX, do not natively provide either the USB 3 or SATA 6Gb/s controller with full 500MB/s bandwidth.
The new ATI Radeon HD 4290 is designed to provide a significant improvement over the earlier HD 4200 integrated graphics. Take the chart below for what it’s worth…it is provided by AMD to show frame rates on some popular games comparing the HD 4290 with the Core i5 661 and Core i3 530 on-die graphics. I dunno, I just have a real problem with even mentioning gaming on a rig with integrated graphics, except that the rig is capable of having a gaming video card added to it and expect to add one if you want to do much other than play Facebook apps, PopCap games and The Sims. I guess my standards are just too high, but I am accustomed to reviewing high-end gaming hardware, not “off the shelf” Dells, HPs, Compaqs, and notebooks…the graphics that the HD 4290 is suppose to better.
Layout of the board is fairly typical, all of the internal connectors are on or near the perimeter of the motherboard. There is no floppy port, I haven’t seen one this year so I guess that they are finally gone. I actually do know someone who still uses them. Needless to say I give him a lot of trouble for it. There is an IDE port, but they will be the next to go.
The M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 has an interesting heatpipe cooler. I guess I’d call the heatsinks “modified pin-fins”. They are the blue color that Asus has been using for the past year or so on most of their “Premium” level boards and below. If you look at their design, they provide quite a lot of heat dissipation surface area for the overall size of the heatsinks, pretty important as sophisticated as motherboard voltage regulation is getting. Of course the more complicated it gets, the more MOSFETs are involved, and the more heat generated. I’ve had one motherboard recently with a fan, not on the NB cooler but on the MOSFET cooler. I think that may eventually become the norm.
Yeah, there is the big notice on the cooler “Hybrid Technology”. Asus has added more “hybrid” features, I’ll talk about that a little later.
Looking at the CPU socket, we find AMD’s typical ware. There are lots of ferrite chokes here along with several solid (leak proof) capacitors. Look at the top right corner of the photo, you’ll see something I’ve often wanted but never have seen before. Larger motherboard heatsinks can make it a pain to get to the board’s CPU power connector. I have gotten to the point where I always plug in the ATX12v power connector before installing the motherboard into the case. Asus has extended the power connector about even with the board power supply heatsink. Very cool!
Yeah, there is the big notice on the cooler “Hybrid Technology”. Asus has added more “hybrid” features, I’ll talk about that a little later.
As I mentioned earlier, the AMD 890GX chipset has a brand new integrated VGA, the Radeon HD 4290. In addition, there is a pair of PCI-E x16 slots, capable of running x16 and x8/x8. The board supports both Hybrid CrossFire and CrossFireX. There is also a PCI-E x4 slot, a PCI-E x1 slot, and a pair of traditional PCI slots.
Note the four internal USB 2.0 connectors. The board will support 14 USB 2.0 ports.
This is the first motherboard I’ve seen with native support for SATA 6Gb/s, there aren’t separate ports for SATA2 and SATA 6Gb/s like other motherboards. SATA 6Gb/s is backwards compatible with SATA2, so just plug in your mechanical hard drives or SATA2 SSDs into the ports as usual. There are six SATA ports, four conventional and a pair located on the front edge of the motherboard.
The M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 supports up to 16 gigs of DDR3-2000 memory, of course you will probably have to overclock the processor to attain that speed.
If you are an AMD kind of guy/gal, you will instantly notice a difference in the configuration in the DIMM slots. Finally, AMD has alternated the slots rather than have the same-channel slots side by side, allowing for use of memory modules with large heatsinks such as the OCZ Reaper and ReaperX series. This has been a sore spot with me for quite some time, several times I could not use the memory I really wanted to with an AMD board because of it.
Forward of the DIMM slots switches that make up some of the “hybrid” features of the board, MemOK, Core Unlocker, and Turbo Key II. I’ve talked about MemOK before, if you are having memory compatibility problems, pushing the button should take care of them. I will talk about Core Unlocker and Turbo Key II in a few minutes.
We have a pretty full I/O panel here, mostly due to the integrated VGA output. There are: PS/2 Keyboard, 4 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 3.0 (backwards compatible with USB 2.0), optical S/PDIF, HDMI, Sub-15, DVI, powered eSATA (SATA 2), IEEE 1394, a single LAN port, and HD Audio. Also, here we have a better view of the extended CPU power connector.
Not a lot of accessories here, mainly to keep the cost of this board low. There is everything you need though, and Asus includes their excellent padded Q-shield. There are four SATA cables, a ribbon IDE cable, Q-connectors, and something called a VGA Switch Card.
The Asus VGA switch card is to be used when one video card will be used with the M4A89GTD Pro/USB3. When inserted into the second x16 slot, it will allow a single video card to run at x16. Remove the card when running two video cards in CrossFire. I will be testing the integrated graphics and won’t be using a separate video card so I won’t be using the VGA Switch Card.
