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

I bought this board as it was the AM3 socket I was looking for. Overall I am very impressed with the board. I had a bit of a problem installing the board in my case as there wasn't enough room for the back cover. The board also has a great design, I like the mem ok button, I had some initial issues with my ram (it doesn't accept 1600mhz ram out of the box) but it's just a workaround, just pop in the ram and press mem-ok button, and everything will work fine, then just go into bios and change desired frequency to 1600MHz. The BIOS is also great for this board, makes it very easy to set up a lot of things and the layout is very user friendly. If you want to take a risk, you can try to unlock cores, some AMD processors have locked cores, for example Athlon II and Phenom II X2 and X3 models are core locked models, if you are lucky they are the locked ones Cores in a healthy state, so add 1 more and maybe even 2 cores to your processor. Just a little warning and note that the X2 and X3 models are usually marked as such on the locked cores due to manufacturing defects. So keep in mind that there is no guarantee that you will get extra cores and if you unlock the cores you may have to play with the settings to make them stable. But hey, if you buy a dual/tri-core and try to unlock it, worst case you won't lose, you'll just be stuck with the CPU you paid for, which is still pretty good since AMD offers very good prices for their products, you should just get a heck of a lot for your buck when you can get a quad-core processor for the price of a dual-core processor. Small note: the GTD version (this one) comes with a decent integrated graphics card (ATI Radeon HD 4290) where you can change the amount of onboard memory used up to 512 MB, giving you a 512 MB DDR3 graphics card without paying graphics card and I have to say the integrated graphics card impresses me, you can't do anything with it except light games, but TF2 (high settings) and Fallout 3 (medium settings) runs quite well on it, I even heard it that you can play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 smoothly on the lowest settings. at least for the time being (October 2010) almost all games should be playable on the lowest settings. So if you're on a budget, you can temporarily stop buying a graphics card with this board, which I did. I ended up buying an ATI Radeon HD 5770. All in all, I highly recommend this board, its range of functions will come in handy for users of almost any level, moreover, for many years you will not have to update the device itself, since it was created for updating. Build: ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 - AM3 - AMD 890GX - DDR3 - USB 3.0 SATA 6Gb/s - ATX Motherboard AMD Athlon II X4 640 Propus 3.0 GHz 4 x 512 KB L2 Cache Socket AM3 Quad Core 95 W – Retail ADX640WFGMBOX Corsair Dual Channel Corsair DDR3 4GB Memory for Intel Core i5 Processors (CMX4GX3M2A1600C9) OCZ OCZ550FTY Fatal1ty Series Western Digital Caviar Blue 550W Power Supply 500GB 3.5" Bulk/OEM Hard Drive w/ 16MB Cache, min. 7200RPM, SATA II WD5000AAKS Thermaltake V5 Black Edition Mid-Tower Gaming Case VL70001W2Z ) Lite-On LightScribe 24X SATA DVD+/-RW Dual-Layer Drive IHAS424-98 - Retail (Black)