Tech Reaction

Recently our friends at Asus sent across their new 890FX board, the M4A89TD Pro. With this board, the total number of boards that Asus plans to have with the 890FX chipset are around four. The range topper will be the Crosshair IV Extreme, which is still to be released, followed by the Crosshair IV Formula which we reviewed earlier, the M4A89TD Pro USB3.0 and finally this one. The last two boards have a great ancestor in the M4A790 series and I hope they will live up to the name. They have hardly been seen on various forums around the net and I thought that this would be a good time to show you what these boards are capable of.

The difference between the bottom two models in the 890 FX line up is the missing support for USB 3.0. The chipsets and all the other features remain the same. The board comes with a brown PCB with the various ports on the board being a mixture of black, dark blue and light blue. While the overall look is fine, the brown PCB kind of kills it for me.

The board has a pretty good layout with dual 16x PCIE slots in addition to four other expansion slots. The space between the two PCIE slots is more than enough to handle dual slot cards and will run them both with 16 lanes each. Now for most of us, two slots is more than enough, and three or more slots will normally be used only when benching. The memory slots are now alternating, which means that memory with larger heat sinks will fit comfortably, but it also means that one of the memory sticks is going to sit beneath most of the larger CPU heat sinks. There are three buttons on board for the Core Unlocker, Mem Ok and the Turbo Key, but the quality and finish of these switches leave a lot to be desired. I would rather have push button switches than these. The board boasts of a 6+2 phase design, and from our initial testing, the design seems to be doing a great job.

The various chipsets and VRM’s are cooled by aluminum heat sinks and Asus has done away with the heat pipe for this version. They have also followed MSI’s design idea of keeping the 890 chipset and the power phases under a single heat sink on the left of the CPU area. This allows them more space for expansion slots.

Coming to the bottom of the board, we see the IDE ports, which really don’t make sense any more unless you’re doing some hard core benching and still use an IDE hard drive, as well as 6 SATA III 6 Gbps ports. My only grouse with this is the upturned SATA ports, which tend to interfere with the second GPU slot when it is populated. A 90 degree port setup would be more convenient.

Overall, there are a few things that tend to be out of place on an 890FX board and I have listed them above.
Other than that, I am quite happy with the board on the whole, taking into consideration that this is the budget board of the line up and therefore some of the fancy specifications must take a back seat.

I will be testing the board with the following setup:

AMD 965 BE C3
Memory: Team Xtreem LV 2000 Mhz CL9 @ 1846 CL 8-8-7 1T
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Motherboard: Asus M4A89TD PRO
Thermalright Venomous X
Coolermaster Storm Sniper Case
Coolermaster Silent Power 700W

We will run through a couple of tests in this blog and I will add a few more if required or requested in the next part.

So let’s start off with some Super Pi runs, just to see the performance of the memory. None of these clocks are at the absolute limit of the board or the chip, but more of an indication on the memory being used and the potential of this board. I must add that the bios seems to be working well with my 965 BE and I did not have a single issue on this front after the initial tuning. Unlike the MSI that I use everyday, the Asus board also has a much better recovery feature that does not need the constant use of a clear CMOS button every time we load a rather heavy overclock. Much appreciated Asus.

Please keep in mind that all of these benches are on air, on a normal install of Windows 7 32bit, without any tweaks.

Super Pi 1 M:

Super Pi 32 M:

As you can see, the memory timings and speed is not bad for the money. The G.Skill’s can barely reach this speed and timing with their 1600 CL7 kit and the same board. For anyone looking for budget ram with decent clocks this is it. I was not able to go above 1800 with slightly lower timings on my MSI GD70, so this shows that the 890FX chipset does add a bit to the memory speeds and timings. With an X6, the speeds and timings could improve even further with their improved IMC.

Wprime:

Cinebench:

The Cinebench score is no surprise here and of course would improve under a 64 bit operating system.

Let’s move on to the max HTT clocks that we can get with this board. I started with 300 HTT, so let’s take it from there:

300 HTT:

330HTT:

340HTT:

Well, that was the maximum I could reach for now, but I will continue testing to see if there is a hole in the HTT clocking. I’ve been seeing people hitting speeds higher than these, so as I said I will continue to push the board and report back. This is it for now and please do let me know if you would like to see some more benches and of what type.

Thanks for reading and have a nice day!