ASRock 890FX Deluxe: Comprehensive Motherboard Review & Investigation of Thuban Performance Scaling
by Rajinder Gill on August 31, 2010 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- ASRock
- AMD
- Motherboards
- 890FX
Timed with Phenom II X6 CPU launch, AMD introduced a new platform to go along and dubbed it “Leo”. Essentially, the Leo platform is comprised of the the following: Phenom II CPU, 890GX/890FX motherboard, and Radeon HD 5800 series video card. Instead of the obvious marketing, we are focusing on what has changed on the 890FX from the 790FX. The improvements are rather sparse, but there still are meaningful improvements on Leo platform over previous generation platforms and we covered some of those in the past.
While the changes are subtle, they are just about enough to make the 890FX the most advanced desktop chipset today. The most significant contributions lie in the amount of PCI Express 2.0 at its disposal as well as the official support of SATA 6.0 Gbps standard. Not only does it provide the most PCIe bandwidth, but from what we’ve seen most board makers opt to utilize the PCIe 2.0 lanes stemming from the north bridge for the boards’ PCIe slots and peripheral controllers unlike Intel’s PCH-based solutions that rely on PCIe 1.0 bandwidth then have to go through slow DMI bus. On ASRock’s 890FX Deluxe 4 we had no problem fully saturating the total available 42 lanes.
However one thing we find somewhat dubious is AMD’s claim of 5.2 GT/s of HyperTransport bandwidth. The HyperTransport bandwidth is closely related to the CPU-NB (CPU’s Integrated memory controller) frequency as we will see later, and in order for HyperTransport bus to supply 5.2 GT/s of bandwidth the CPU-NB should be running at 2.6 GHz or faster. We do not know of a shipping AMD CPU with its CPU-NB at 2.6 GHz, so that kind of makes the 5.2 GT/s claim meaningless. To be fair, the claim is on the chipset not on the CPUs, and we did not have trouble running ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4 @2.6 GHz HT Link frequency along with our retail 1090T’s CPU-NB @2.6 GHz.
The interconnect between north bridge and south bridge, A-Link, has been upgraded to PCIe 2.0 standard from PCIe 1.1 on 790FX/SB750 combo. The new south bridge, SB850, is indeed what steals the spotlight, providing six native SATA 6.0 Gbps ports and whooping 14 USB ports. It also retains its RAID capability from its predecessor, but we advise against complex RAID setups like RAID5 or RAID10 on chipset-based controllers. AHCI standard received an upgrade as well, from V1.1 to V1.2.
IOMMU is an acronym of Input-Output Memory Management Unit, and it is supposed to make virtualizing I/O such as the storage subsystem or video cards possible. Even though virtualization is gaining traction on desktops thanks in part to Windows 7’s XP Mode, desktop virtualization is still limited on CPU virtualization. We are still some time away from I/O virtualization on desktops, and in any case we’re not aware of any client Windows OS that support I/O virtualization. So this remains a check-box feature for now.
We are unsure as to why TDPs have increased for both 890FX and SB850, but without AMD disclosing datasheets for those we are left, well, unsure. We assume they did go up considering that AMD heavily touted 10W TDP for 790FX at its launch. This time AMD is rather silent on the TDP front. Lastly, we see AMD’s first gigabit controller native to SB850, but we haven’t seen any board that uses it.
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jonup - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Very impressed to see this approach to your testing. I hete when reading an MB reveiw and reach the benchmark section. Same chipsets tend to perform the same. A guess this would be an one-off since in the next review it will be redundant.vol7ron - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
agreed, nice review.Finally - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I must say that this review was nice to have, I'm much more interested in the 870 Chipset.It's almost identical, except the support of Crossfire, which I have no use for.
RequiemsAllure - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
ahh, but on the ASRock 870 extreme 3 Crossfire is supported.SpaceRanger - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
In the article:USB 3.0 Performance
We use Acronis TrueImage Home (v. 10) to make a backup of our installation drive to an external SATA 3.0 Gbps drive via USB 3.0 and compare it with USB 2.0 and SATA 3.0 Gbps transfers. The total data backed up is approximately 20 GB. We could not complete the backup on the 890GTD Pro/USB3 in a consistent manner.
My Question:
Why were you not able to complete the backup on the 890GTD Pro/USB3? At the conclusion you state :
Is it worth $180 when ASUS 890GTD Pro/USB3 is $30 less? We think the difference largely comes down to the board’s selection of components.
I would call not being able to do a simple backup with the 890GTD enough of a showstopper to not even consider the board. Am I missing something here?
semo - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I'm also wondering about the SATA3 performance. An issue was identified here on AT with the new 8xx chipset earlier which slowed down SSDs considerably compared to ICH10 controllers. Has this been fixed yet?Kane Y. Jeong - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Hi,Please check Raja's ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 review here.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2959
We purchased another retail M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 off the shelf, and still ran into inconsistent USB 3.0 performance. Sometimes the drives lost connections, and Acronis reported error in the middle of backup process. Success ratio to complete the backup was about 30~40%. An alternative would be to purchase M4A89GTD Pro (not Pro/USB3) for $10 less and go with an add-in card. We did not experience this issue on ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4.
SpaceRanger - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Thank you for the response. So you're advising getting the Pro (not Pro/USB3) instead of the 890FX? Cause Raja's findings would be enough for me to not want to get it.nbjknk - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
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Thursday, 21 October 2010 at 9:48 PM
optarix12 - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
This is a very nice writeup and relevant to my interests to boot. Thank you for the concise article Kane. Oh, and if you ever figure out why you saw the inexplicable results you should do a part 2!