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United States of America, Scottsdale
1 Level
679 Review
51 Karma

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

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Great Board: Internals

This is actually my first ASUS board. I've used MSI products for the past few years with no problems, so why this change? After reading the specs of the new MSI, I liked the fact that ASUS has more features, including a core unlock that allows all cores to reach full performance, and I've also heard from friends that ASUS has really good BIOSes - manufactures chipsets. This board has some really remarkable features like USB 3 and SATA 6 that won't affect users so much now but will soon in the future. Another feature I've never seen before is the easy BIOS update feature that allows the user to update the BIOS in the BIOS and check the file to ensure it's compatible with the chipset. There are many other features I haven't gotten to grips with like Hybrid CrossfireX technology and ASUS TurboV EVO, not to mention other overclocking features, but I have to admit that I'm not even the type to overclock with one Liquid cooling mainly because I'm not a millionaire and can't afford to overheat my CPU, but if you have the money and experience this board will definitely take advantage of your CPU and also support the new 6 cores; In addition, this new chipset features an integrated Radeon HD 4290 GPU supporting 512MB of memory and featuring Direct X 10.1 and multiple VGA, HDMI, DVI and RGB outputs. I only used the integrated board on the first run so I didn't get a chance to see what it's capable of in games like Bioshock or Battlefield Bad Company, but I can imagine playing at 1920x1080p with pretty much any max Attitude. . If there's something wrong with this board, it doesn't support a floppy drive, and while you don't need one anyway, I bought a brand new one along with the floppy drives, but that's just to use older technology, in the past a floppy was for required for partitioning and RAID drivers. All in all, the price and technology of this board is more than exceptional and it worked without problems from the first time I switched it on. ASUS also gives you some pretty good software on its driver CD, like the ASUS Probe 2, which offers great performance interface and temperature gauge motherboard and processor. Now I just have to save some money for another Radeon card, after that I can test the Crossfire X. -Great board.

Pros
  • Positive only
Cons
  • Poor manual