Hardware Asus M4A89GTD Pro/USB Motherboard Review

AMD's latest chipset is the first to bring SATA 6Gbps support, but it also seems to bring massive overclockability. We look at the first board from Asus - priced at around £120, it looks like a bargain for getting the most from your Phenom II or Athlon II CPU.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2010/03/02/asus-m4a89gtd-pro-usb-review/1

 

I still don't get it why Asus is still using IDE and not place the Sata in a 90degree angle. Not only with this motherboard but most of the midrange motherboards. I don't think it makes any difference in price to put 90degree Sata on the edge off the motherboard, but at least that is what I as a customers really wants. It looks better /cleaner cable wise and it saves time fiddling with connectors around graphic cards. At least Gigabyte understands this a lot better giving enough sata ports on the edge in the mid-range and high-range line up of both amd and intel motherboards

 

is it possible to run 2 monitors off a graphics card in the pcie and one out of the onboard?

 

Yes, as long as it's an ATI card. Hydravision has always supported multi-monitor using onboard and PCI-E way back even before ATI was bought by AMD.

Obiwan - yes true, but in this instance they don't get in the way of anything and 890GX is more mainstream than 890FX where we'd have more of a complaint. We recommend the Asus board because it's currently the only one to offer core unlocking - which is an important reason to upgrade.

 

I just built a PC for a professional photographer. He went from a 2001 dell to an athlon 620 (very limited budget). I had to carry over an IDE DVD-RW and he also had an IDE HDD. While not every one uses them they are still handy, especially if you have old files you want to transfer and don't have an external HDD. Also means he can have an extra 200gb until he decides to get another HDD or a 2nd DVD-RW. Quite a few people I know still have an IDE HDD in their system

 

Frustrated to see the Sata ports location, with my big fingers I find it annoying to remove the cables (especially the ones with latches)...but still a good board..definitely going to wait a little longer before upgrading..

 

Can you use both the PCI-E 16x slots for non-vga cards? (I'm thinking HBA)

 

Yep, use the integrated GPU for screen-out, and any PCI-E card can go in those 16x slots.

 

sorry correction... can you use an nvidia card for 2 monitors and the onboard for the 3rd?

thinking fermi here

 

Why is there some board thing sticking out the white slot then?

 

That's a paddle card - needs to be inserted for the IGP to work.

Great board, great price. A worthy successor to the 785G/790GX

 

I'm pretty sure driver conflicts won't support that. You'll need 3 ATI for Hydravision.

 

From the review
The bottom 16x PCI-E slot is the primary graphics slot, a layout that’s fairly common with AMD motherboards. By default, the two 16x slots operate in a dual-8x configuration; a switch card (see main photograph) must be placed in the white PCI-E slot to yield 16x speed in the primary blue slot.

However, we found that no matter which configuration we used for the switch card and our test graphics card, we couldn’t obtain 16 lanes of bandwidth. If you mistakenly place the switch card in the blue slot, the board will refuse to boot too. A neater way to achieve the switch card’s intended purpose is to use dedicated ICs soldered to the board to automatically switch the PCI-E lanes. However, this adds a significant amount to the overall price of a motherboard.

 

hmm this might be a nice option for the MTPC/Game Server ^_^

 

how does the MSI 890GX-G65 compare? will u be doing a review of it soon......

 

Additional cost or not, it's 2010. Why the hell are we still using switcher cards.