Introduction

AMD has been having great success with their HD 5xxx line. These GPUs are not only the only DX11 parts on the market at the moment, but have performance that out does just about every offering from NVIDIA. However, they have not been doing overly well in the chipset and CPU market. Here they have been outdone by Intel consistently over the last few years.

This has been good for Intel, but bad for the market in general. Of course, AMD has made some great strides in the CPU realm and in fact have produced some good and inexpensive products that have quite a bit of room for overclocking. Now they are moving back to the chipset side and are launching a new chipset today, the 890GX.

This chipset brings the first SATA 3.0 only motherboard to the market. This is in stark contrast to the Marvell driven offerings from Intel. AMD's 890GX is also the first board to use all PCIe 2.0 lanes for increased (and proper) bandwidth to its peripherals.

So let's take a look at the AMD 890GX in the form of the ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 motherboard.