Nice review thanks.

NB & VRMs run hot! You could light up a cigarette at those temps.

MSI 890GXM-G65 is an interesting mATX board. I've heard it has lower power consumption and is "cooler" than the competition.

Are you planning to test it?

PeSi

I'd be interested in seeing that as well.

thanks for review, and closing thoughts are greatness as always.

I give the board a thumbs up...not two thumbs up, but if to go upgrade, the 1156 and intel is the first time I would drift away to amds pin socket...in almost 10 years.

the retail cost is well worth it, gicen the backplate is hgher grade, some extras taking some little frustrations out when build time.


the videos you showed for viewing have been out for 5+ years, encoded with vc-1 on a prescott no doubt.
it is to give a heads up on what some may believe as a true evolution, when it really is not. But again, if to stay pin grid and need a new system, I'd give it a go.

Meanwhile I a still run the ati 3650, with custom cooling on low latency agp and a socket 478.... at 6 years this year... and not even close to dead yet.

it is up to knowledge now, more than ever, when it comes to building...not so much evolution.

sigh... another new revision with bits added.

i'm more interested in something that has more powerful graphics and/or is more energy efficient- when will the true next gen chipsets arrive?

Well. I kinda like it. Nothing too frilly, but at least it isnt overpriced like a retarded 1156 system. Also, it probably doesnt fry the socket and cpu pins like most 1156 systems do eventually due to Foxcon sockets.

For stability and comparison I would pit this against a 1366 920 DO intel chip and board. That's just me though, most dont care about 1156 manufacturing flaws and just rather a cheaper, cooler system that runs games well. Hm. Got my thoughts out there.

By the way... when is this board going for sale to spcr members, eh?

I almost bought the RavenII case, but it was just a bit out of my league. I would love to go am3 this time.

Also, as I read it I saw the negative light on usb3.0. I cant tell you how much I can't stand 2.0. It is as slow as poop. Terribly inconsistent for external HD usage. FirewireB goes a lot lot lot faster. So, there must be room for 3.0..... right? no? has to be? hamburger? relish? some fries?

Not true.

So what mechanical non-RAID hard drives are capable of sustaining >3.0Gbps?

They're not. My PMP is, though.

Would you like to elaborate?

If you were confused and thinking of USB 3 I understand.

Maybe the confusion is between SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 3.0? You do realize that SATA 3.0 = SATA 6Gb/s don't you?

For convenience many type 3GB when they mean SATA 2.0 even though 3GB should technically be 3Gb/s.

The confusion in terminology is the only thing that makes sense as there is no such thing as a single rotating disk hard drive that can even noticeably stress SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 6Gb/s hasn't been stressed by a single drive even when it comes to consumer grade SSDs.

This doesn't change the fact that you can easily exceed 3Gb/s with a PMP, 6Gb/s only just about covers a 5-port. RAID or SSDs are not required.

Maybe you should explain what you mean by PMP. Do you mean one of these:

* Port Mapping Protocol
* Point-to-multipoint communication (telecommunications)
* Prime Material Plane
* Portable media player, a handheld electronic device that supports the playback of digital media
* Project management plan, a component of project management
* Project Management Professional, a certification in project management
* Protected Media Path
* Port multiplier, a device that allows one to connect multiple SATA devices to a single SATA host port

Or are you using an even less obvious term?

If you are just referring to a Port Multiplier you are being pedantic by saying multiple drives isn't equivalent to RAID. What part of "a single rotating disk hard drive" applies to 5 drives in an enclosure? Who cares if they are proper RAID, JBOD, or 5 unique drives if they all share a data path?

If you mean a Portable media player I say that is an SSD equivalent or it wouldn't be fast enough to matter.

If you are going for one of the others I can't help you. The Prime material plane will always have more bandwidth than any single motherboard can handle no matter what SATA standard you use and when it comes to outstripping a SATA port I'd say Point-to-multipoint communication might as well be as broad as the Prime material plane lord knows equipment of that type is out of my price range.

OK, looking at this again I agree with redzo.

When I first saw this I got hung up on SATA 6Gb/s vs 3Gb/s.

When I look at it now I see "hard drives remain the norm".

Essentially the numbers added up but the intent of the statement didn't catch my attention. I don't think downplaying the importance of SATA 6Gb/s is the right tone to set.

In the life of an average motherboard of something like 3 to 5 years I don't expect hard drives to remain the norm. Looking forward SSDs will double in capacity around Fall 2010 and again around Spring 2012. It is entirely likely that hard drives won't be used as boot devices much at all in the near future.

I guess really the accuracy of the tone of that statement is in or out of balance with reality depending on whether you are likely to take old components and match them with the new motherboard (looking to past performance) or are likely to upgrade your system every time there is a major price/performance shift (looking to future performance).

Of course I'm talking about port multipliers, and they're the only relevant item on that list..

Well it may seem odd to you but calling a port multiplier a PMP makes as much sense to me as calling it a TMU it's just 3 random letters out of two words.

It'd be like calling a Water Closet a WCE or WCS instead of just WC. What is the point of pulling the p out of the middle of multiplier? Is there a 3 word acronym for a Port Multiplier I don't know about that supplies the final P? Do people somewhere type out Port Multi Plier instead of Port Multiplier?

Would you rather everyone go around using PM and getting confused with power management?

Personally I'd rather drop the TLAs and just say Port Muliplier and Power Management.

I was just hoping you knew why they picked the P as the TL for that A.

What else would you use? Personally, I'd rather people just learn the TLAs for the subject they choose to discuss.

Anyway, what I forgot to mention in my previous posts is eSATA. Few systems provide more than one port, which makes PMPs important, and 3Gbps a bottleneck. Unfortunately SATA 3.1 isn't out with that just yet.

SATA 3.1? Snap, I thought eSATA 6 GB/s was in 3.0. That is stupid. So all these motherboards with 6GB/s sata controllers may need add in cards to be 6GB/s compliant for eSATA?

Yet another reason to just buy a 785G or 770 motherboard and add a SATA 3.x card down the road. I'll wait. Thanks for the heads up.

So far as I know, eSATA 6Gb/s isn't in 3.0, and is waiting for 3.1. Any current eSATA controllers offering 6Gb/s will likely not be compliant with the final spec.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3778

Apparently SATA 6 GB/s performance varies wildly from motherboard to motherboard even on the same chipset in some cases.

It also looks like BIOS updates will improve the SATA performance for 890GX boards in the coming months.

It appears the Asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 board has improved efficiency and fan control over the Asus 785 boards, too bad its price is so much greater.
check the results at xbit:
with the following setup:

CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 635 (Propus, 2.9 GHz, 4 x 512 KB L2 cache)
Mainboards:
ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 (Socket AM3, AMD 890GX + SB850, DDR3 SDRAM)
Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H (Socket AM3, AMD 890GX + SB850, DDR3 SDRAM)
Gigabyte GA-MA785GT-UD3H (Socket AM3, AMD 785G + SB710, DDR3 SDRAM)
Memory: 2 x 2 GB, DDR3-1333 SDRAM, 7-7-7-20 (Mushkin 996601)
Graphics card: AMD Radeon HD 5870 (Both IGP and discrete VGA are tested separately)
Hard disk drive: Western Digital WD3000HLFS
Operating system: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Drivers: ATI Catalyst 10.3 Display Driver

The numbers on the Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H seem very close to SPCRs numbers, taking the difference in hardware into account.
It looks like the Asus should give the MSI 890 &785 boards some competition in the efficiency champ measurement.

That's an unfair comparison, the 890GX is the successor of the 790GX. Wait for the 880G.

So SYS_FAN1 and SYS_FAN2 have no thermostatic control? That would be very disappointing! The manual (in BIOS setup) implies that at least SYS_FAN1 has temperature control.