AMD’s new/last IGP motherboard—the 890GX

Posted by Kathleen Maher on March 19th 2010 | Discuss
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: aib pmark fps usb3 motherboard

ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 motherboard. (Source: ASUS)

AMD has continued to impress us with their chipsets and the new ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 is one of their finest. The 890GX represents the last IGP chipset from AMD before the move to Fusion. The basic specs are formidable. It has an AM3 socket for a Phenom II (and several other processors). It can run up to four 1333 MHz DDR3 memory DIMMs (dual in-line memory module), has a VGA, DVI, and HDMI video outputs, as well as 1394, SATA, and 12 USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports—one of the first boards to embrace the new specification.

The 890GX is under the long blue-finned heatsink, with the southbridge SB850 fitted under the square heat sink behind the PCIe card slots.

The 890GX is at 55nm and SB850 is at 65nm. ASICs are in full production now and AMD’s partners did a worldwide launch on March 2nd. The usual suspects will launch a mobo: Asus, MSI, Asrock, ECS, Jetway, Biostar, Foxconn, and probably others. The average price will be around $140.

Figure 1: AMD 890GX architecture overview. (Source: AMD)

Testing the 890GX

We ran benchmarks on the New/last AMD 890GX IGP and compared them to similar tests we ran on Intel’s i5 Clarksdale, and on two older systems with Vista, an Intel Icedale and an AMD 780GX.

The Pmark for the AMD-based 890GX system is compared to the Intel i5-based system for the Pmark score.

Pmark

The PMark

Where:

  • Performance is expressed in 3DMark Vantage score
  • Price is expressed in US dollars
  • Power is expressed in watts of the AIB

When Performance is expressed in FPS then the FPS score is multiplied by 100 to put it in the same range as the 3D Vantage scores.

The components that go into the Pmark are as follows.

  • Price. The two systems are priced very closely with the AMD motherboard, processor, and 4GB of 1666 DDR3 coming in at $409, and the Intel coming in at $405. A visit to Newegg for a price sample reveals that the 890GX boards currently range from $119 to $149 and the site reveals that lower priced boards are expected in the future. The same site reveals that the Intel DP55WP Media Series P55 micro-ATX i7 Core LGA 1156 Desktop Motherboard is $125.
  • Power. Measuring the two systems at the wall while running Vantage, the AMD drew 75 Watts and the Intel drew 65 Watts.
  • Performance. The Futuremark Vantage chart shows the relative performance of four similar systems.

Figure 2: Pmark comparison of AMD 945 processor and 980GX IGP vs. Intel i5 processor with IPG. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Figure 3: Vantage testing on current and past generations of systems. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

There was some discussion on the web about Futuremark not approving Intel’s drivers because they had game—and supposedly Futuremark—sensing in them. Intel refers to that as load balancing, and although that’s not against any rules (and can in fact be a good thing), Futuremark doesn’t allow it. However, in Intel’s notebook driver there is no detection.

What do we think?

It’s difficult to make simple comparisons between the AMD Phenom II/890GX and the Intel i5 because the graphics are so dramatically different. AMD has 40 graphics shaders, and Intel has 12. The problem (for AMD) is that the benefit of those cores doesn’t come into play unless you are running a full screen 1080p Blu-ray movie, or using a 30-inch 2560 x 1600 monitor. Intel’s i5 can only drive a screen resolution of 1280 x 800, and so it was impossible to get an apples-to-apples comparison, and the lowest common dominator does not show AMD off well.

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