AMD’s 890GX Chipset: Low-End Price, High-End Features

ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 890GX Motherboard Overview

One of ASUS’ first boards sporting the 890GX name will be their M4A89GTD PRO/USB3. While the “Pro” name may throw some of you off, this is actually a relatively basic board with additional support for USB 3.0 built in via a controller chip. Pricing should be around the $145 (non-USB 3.0) to $155 (the board we see below) range. Remember, this is only a preview of this product so expect us to go into more depth in the review itself.


The box looks to take a different approach when compared to past ASUS products and moves towards a “green” theme. All of the necessary information is there for the reading and the back of the box actually goes into quite a bit of detail.


The board itself is impressive to say the least but don’t be mistaken by the picture above; the PCB is actually a deep brown; not black.


The M4A89GTD sports a relatively robust power distribution section capped off by an impressive looking heatsink design. One of the more interesting features of this motherboard is the tall 8-pin CPU connector which is designed to allow access without needing to worry about the heatsink getting in the way.


Making our way south along the side of the board we come to a switch for core unlocking on two or three core AMD chips as well as a Turbo Key toggle which is supposed to automatically overclock your CPU. Further down, there are a pair of SATA 6Gb/s connectors that are placed at a right angle to the board as well as four additional headers closer to the southbridge heatsink.


Even though for the most part the expansion slot connectors are spaced at very good intervals, ASUS has resorted to an archaic mode for PCI-E lane switching. Basically, instead of including an on-board chip to automatically control the switch from one PCI-E 16x slot to two PCI-E 8x slots when two GPUs are installed, both mechanical PCI-E slots run natively at 8x mode. In order to get the bottom slot to word at full 16x performance, you need to install an included dummy card. And no, the top PCI-E slot will never work at 16x mode, even if you install the switcher into the bottom slot.


The backplate shows a great selection of connectors with the two blue USB headers allowing for full USB 3.0 speeds and various display outputs (including a HDMI 1.3 connector) to round things out.