Review on Asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 AM3 AMD 890GX/SB850 Motherboard - 6 SATA USB 3.0, ATX by Robert Lemons

Although I originally had an Asus board that came with my HP computer, this is my first retail board that I've bought as part of a build. I was not disappointed. I connected the board to an X4 955 and 4 sticks Patriot 2GB memory. Booted up with no problems the first time. I was able to install Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit without any problems. Once the operating system was loaded, the included drivers installed without a problem. The driver pack includes great utilities like TurboV and Fan Xpert. TurboV is handy because it allows me to quickly configure settings in Windows before entering them into the BIOS. Speaking of which, the bios is well thought out and has more options than I know what to do with. Fan Xpert is also great because it allows me to create my own fan profiles along with the included profiles. AMD Overdrive is also enabled, although it gave me some trouble working with the clock settings. This is normal as TurboV can also perform this function. Where the Overdrive really shined was in the monitoring, which it handled with ease. I hope that a future update will fix some issues with it. Physically, the board is quite well designed. Radiators are installed on both the north and south bridges. The power regulators also have a heatsink, which is a good idea when overclocking. The northbridge and power regulator heatsinks are connected by a heat pipe, which aids in heat dissipation and increases the effective heat dissipation area. To the right of socket AM3 are 4 color-coded DDR3 RAM slots for two dual-channel memory pairs. When using the Hyper 212 plus I found that the outer edge of the 120mm fan was touching the top of the heatsink on the shaft closest to the socket. I moved the fan just a little to fix the problem, but that's still something to consider. This board supports many PCI options including 2 standard PCI slots, 1 PCI-E x1 slot, 1 PCI-E x4 slot and 2 PCI-E x16 slots. Due to the limitations of the 880GX Northbridge, only one of the x16 slots can run at full x16 speed. If both are used, each will only have half speed, or x8. If you want to use the full x16 speed, you must use the bottom blue x16 slot. If you have a larger graphics card, you lose one of the PCI slots. Below the PCI slots are various headings. There are definitely plenty of USB ports, although there's no Firewire port in sight. To the right of this are 6 SATA ports, each operating at a speed of 6Gbps. These, along with 2 USB 3.0 ports, ensure you're future-proof for a while. There is a standard 24-pin motherboard power connector, as well as an 8-pin EATX connector that provides enough power for new AMD processors. There are 4 fan connectors on the board, 3 of which are controlled and 2 with PWM support. The managed ones can be programmed either through the BIOS or through the included Fan Xpert software. In terms of speed, it works as expected and sometimes even better. The USB 2.0 ports are almost twice as fast as on my previous motherboard, at least as far as flash drive transfer speeds go. I can only imagine what Ports 3.0 is capable of. The onboard Radeon graphics are very reasonable, playing 1080p60 videos from the TM-700k and even YouTube 4k with no issues.