The BIOS
The M4A89GTD Pro/USB3, as nearly all Asus motherboards, uses the American Megatrends BIOS. This is a tabbed BIOS for easy navigation. The BIOS opens to the Main menu, which contains date/time, drives found during POST, and the System Information submenu.
The System Information submenu gives BIOS information and basic CPU info.
The AI Tweaker menu contains all relevant overclocking settings. The only submenus are for memory tweaks, where they should be.
Precision voltage tweaking is made very easy by Asus’ Precision Tweaker 3. Rather than increments of .125 or other rather large voltage tweaks, Precision Tweaker 3 gives you tiny increments for real precision. For example, the VCore increments are .003125v.
The Advanced menu contains submenus for settings of the various motherboard subsystems.
The CPU Configuration submenu has settings not included in the AI Tweaker menu such as Cool n’ Quiet and C1E. Also found here is Core Unlocker, which I will talk about shortly.
The Onboard Devices menu has settings to enable/disable the various controllers on the motherboard.
The Power menu contains various power related settings and the HW monitor.
The HW Monitor contains relevant temperatures, voltages, and fan speeds, and also contains the controls for the onboard fan buses.
The Boot Settings Configuration submenu is contained within the Boot menu. Here you can disable the POST splash screen.
No overclocking of the NB, which (as we all should know) has an enormous effect on the performance of an OC’d AMD CPU. No overclocking of the on-board video. No comparison with the HD4200, which this system is supposed to be faster than… and usually isn’t.
I have this board, I have good luck with unlocking both cores of my 550BE. I’ve had really bad luck with fglrx driver stability under KDE, but I’m not the only one. I’ve finally reached stability using fglrx 10.6/10.7 (AMD couldn’t make up their mind which version it was, it was labeled as both point six and point seven on their website and the internal documentation, such is their attention to detail). Word is that 10.8 re-introduces KDE incompatibilities so I haven’t tried it.
Except for that and the occasional KIO crash when using USB 2.0 this board makes a good cheap Linux system with some future-proofing for the USB3 and SATA3 features (I’m using neither at the moment). If AMD would only adjust to the fact that KMS drivers are here and modern Linux desktops use ALL the fade effects and they are expected to work, this would actually be a very nice alternative to buying an Nvidia card for every Linux system built. As it is they are almost there. Maybe. Just fix fglrx, like all of it.