Gigabyte has today announced the Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H, one of the first motherboards bearing AMD’s upcoming 890GX chipset. Icrontic has one of these boards in the lab, and we wanted to bring you information on it in advance of AMD’s official unveiling of the 890GX, which is coming soon!
“The first motherboard featuring the AMD 890GX chipset paired with the all new SB850 South Bridge, the GIGABYTE GA-890GPA-UD3H offers the industry’s first native support for Serial ATA 6Gbps for up to 6 devices,” Gigabyte said today via press release. “The AMD SB850 also offers the industry’s first Serial ATA 6 Gbps RAID support, allowing users to configure RAID 0,1,5 and 10 for maximum data performance or enhanced data backup.”
“Also equipped with GIGABYTE 3x USB Power Boost and USB 3.0 support by utilizing the industry-leading NEC® controller, the GIGABYTE GA-890GPA-UD3H ensures users are ready to take advantage the next wave of high speed data transfer and storage technologies.”
The 890GX chipset is still under a shroud of secrecy, so we cannot yet discuss any performance data, but we are free to talk about the overall design of the board and what Gigabyte has revealed in their press release.
- The EPS12V connector is in an awfully awkward spot for the rising number of cases that employ a bottom-mounted PSU.
- The IDE and ATX connector positions should be swapped, as some power supplies are cursed with short ATX cables. We’d rather see the IDE connector get altogether removed, but you take what you can get.
- The board uses 4+1-phase PWM, hiding under the heatsink to the “left” of the CPU socket. Compared to some of Gigabyte’s 8+2 and 12+2 parallel designs, this board is not likely to be a massive overclocker.
- The blue USB ports on the I/O panel are USB 3.0.
- The six blue SATA ports are powered by the SB850 southbridge, which lurks under the silver chipset in the lower right. These ports all use the new SATA 6Gbps standard.
- The northbridge, containing a Radeon 4290 IGP (DX10.1), lies below the CPU socket. This IGP should offer GPU performance that’s completely unmatched by anyone else on the market, if you’re excited by the IGP thing. It’s more than powerful enough to do HD encode/decode, real-time post-processing and light gaming.
- I/O ports include: Four standard USB, two USB 3.0, HDMI, DVI, optical, 7.1 Dolby-certified HD audio, Firewire and gigabit LAN.
- The PCIe x16 slots can be CrossFired for x8/x8 CF.
- Two PCI and three PCIe x1 slots round out the expansion slots.
- Neither PCIe x16 slot prevents access to DIMM, CMOS or hard drive operations!
All things considered, Gigabyte has done a nice job with the design of the GA-890GPA-UD3H. Most enthusiasts might want to wait for the enthusiast-oriented 890FX boards, which are coming at a slightly later date, but the 890GX and the Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H make a great foundation for an HTPC, a light gaming box for a youngster, or a low-power and economical office PC.
Stay tuned for our review of the of the 890GX chipset when we pit the 890GPA-UD3H and an ECS 890GX board against the Intel Core i5 and the H55/57!
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