Asus M4A89GTD Professional/USB Overview
Producer: Asus
UK Value (as Reviewed): £116.33 (inc VAT)
US Value (as Reviewed): TBC
Asus’s newest mid-range motherboard, the M4A89GTD Professional/USB, has so much going for it on paper. Based mostly on AMD’s newly launched 890GX chipset (the direct alternative for the 790GX), it has a plethora of options and an up to date built-in GPU.
The 890GX chipset is concentrated extra in direction of efficiency, with helpful video and audio playback options for a media PC too. That is mirrored within the Asus board’s styling, which sports activities a black PCB and a fantastic palette of blue hues that complement one another nicely.
The 890GX chipset, in addition to including an up to date Radeon HD 4290, brings with it the SB850 Southbridge and its six SATA 6Gbps connections. AMD has due to this fact overwhelmed Intel to be the primary to help SATA 6Gbps, with Intel planning to introduce help for the quicker storage normal later this yr. As it’s, new Intel boards want to make use of a third-party storage controller so as to add SATA 6Gbps help.
The structure of the board is for probably the most half clear
The Radeon HD 4290 IGP within the chipset is clocked at 700MHz, has 40 DX10.1-compatible stream processors and boasts full UVD 2 help. Asus has soldered 128MB of 1,333MHz facet port reminiscence subsequent to the chipset. If this all sounds acquainted, it’s most likely as a result of it’s; the one notable improve to this IGP over the 790GX chipset is DirectX10.1 help versus 10.
The board’s structure is respectable, however not excellent. Two of the six SATA 6Gbps ports hug the sting of the board at a 90-degree angle in what we take into account to be a super location, however the remaining 4 sit inland. Two are positioned annoyingly near the place a dual-slot graphics card cooler will inevitably sit when slotted into the first 16x PCI-Specific slot (colored blue).
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Whereas you should use these ports even with a Radeon HD 5870 put in, if the SATA connectors have clips, you must take away the graphics card earlier than unclipping the SATA cable. We’d have slightly sacrificed the more and more anachronistic IDE port in favour of higher SATA port positioning. Nonetheless, there are 4 SATA ports which might be straightforward to make use of, so until you are taking full benefit of the RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 capabilities of the Southbridge, you must handle.
