ASUS M4A89GTD Pro - A Core Unlocking 890GX for $140
by Rajinder Gill on March 10, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Conclusion
Although there are areas that ASUS need to work on with the M4A89GTD Pro, what they’ve managed to do is set a paper baseline around the $150 mark that is going to be hard for any vendor to compete against. We think ASUS are bang on the money with BIOS layout, automated overclocking, fan control and core unlocking features.
The only thing we see as a potential hindrance at this stage is the random S3 resume behavior we experienced with our Corsair TX950 PSU. As it stands, out of every ten sleep mode resume attempts, you might find one that requires an AC power cycle to reboot. We know of one other person who has encountered this thus far, and that was after going out to find it on purpose at our behest by using the same components. Given the scarcity of the problem, we could probably live with it if we had to, but these things should work properly and it’s our job to point out when they don’t.
Most of the issues we’ve encountered during the course of this review may not affect you at all depending upon component choices and how you intend to use the board. In fact, a lot of what we’ve pointed out relates to Elpida Hyper memory modules, which many of you won't be pairing with a $150 motherboard. If you fall into that category, then we have no hesitation in recommending the M4A89GTD Pro to you. However, if you’re looking for a little more certainty all round, we’ll repeat a familiar mantra at this point and urge you to wait another month before laying down dollars on this platform.
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semo - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
Who uses one or more legacy PCI card in their modern PC (old boxes don't apply) and what is their purpose (audio, com/lpt, SCSI...)?l8gravely - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
I'm still using Legacy PCI cards, since I'm building (one of these days) a replacement home server. Going with an AMD Quad Core, 4-8Gb of RAM and some disks.I need PCI for a SCSI tape library and a PCI multiport serial card I still have. Builtin video leaves me with tons of expansion options down the line, since I don't need graphics at all.
I'd love to see an article on the perfect cheap home server board, case and system. De-emphasize the OC, video, etc. More LAN ports, builtin video and remote management on the cheap. And of course plenty of SATA ports.
John
ottawanker - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Even a dual-core and anything more than 2 GBs of RAM is way overkill for a home server.I just downgraded my Linux-based fileserver from a Dual-core Socket 939 with 4 GBs of RAM to a Single-core Socket 754 based system with a 25w mobile Turion and 2 GBs of RAM.
Transfer speeds actually went up thanks to the Intel NIC I put in, and I can now average 80-90 MB/second over the network.
I recommend a good NIC, decent SATA controllers, and lots of hard drives if you want a fast fileserver. I have three 4-disk RAID5 arrays and haven't had any data loss yet, even with a couple of failed drives. I'd go RAID6 with anything more than 4-disk arrays, and even then backups are a great idea.
Wellsoul2 - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
I still use a PCI HDTV card.I'd rather the leftmost PCI Express be the 16x and the middle one
stuck at 8x..without the stupid jumper board.
Hopefully you don't have more that one PCI board cause you lose one
with a two slot wide video board.
$140 with a crappy slot layout..I say buy a cheaper board and you can afford whatever AMD BE CPU you want anyway.
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
At this point, around 7 years after PCIe was introduced, users really should have more PCIe than PCI devices. This transition has been in progress forever and I can't wait till it is over.Taft12 - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
RS232 for me!http://www.startech.com/item/PCI1S550-1-Port-16550...">http://www.startech.com/item/PCI1S550-1-Port-16550...
Should have made sure the board I bought included a serial port first, but I don't blame OEMs for stripping these out of their standard motherboard offerings.
mariush - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
I have a TV tuner on one PCI slot... Some have additional SATA or IDE controllers (if the motherboard had no IDE slots)mariush - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
Oh and Firewire cards... some don't have Firewire chips on the motherboardpiroroadkill - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
I use an Auzentech X-Plosion 7.1 DTS Connect because it was the first card made to do DTS 1.5Mbps bitstream encoding over SPDIF in real timepiroroadkill - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
Machine is a Core 2 Duo e6550 @ 3.45GHz, Radeon 4890