Conclusion:

The 890GX and SB8850 have a great feature set which includes plenty of PCIe lanes, CrossFire support, Gigabit LAN and optical audio, two USB3 ports, core unlocking technology and a great set of overclocking features. The SATA3 controller gave the reviewers asbolute nightmares while trying to use it with SATA 3Gbps devices, until they manually told the board which devices was on which port, gamers won't be convinced by the on-board Radeon HD 4290.

Overclocking:

There were no overclocking results, there is a summary of the OC features in the BIOS on the BIOS page.

Compared to:

Biostar TA890GXE.

Benchmarks:

WinRAR, LAME, RazorLAME 1.15a, x264, Everest Ultimate, Paint.NET, X-Bit Labs File Copy benchmark, DUMeter, Left 4 Dead, Custom timedemo, application AA/AF, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. In the gaming benchmarks the Radeon HD 4290 IGP was tested.

Test Setup:

• Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T BE
• Memory: 2x2GB G.Skill 1333MHz DDR3
• Graphics card: ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB
• HDD: 500GB WD Caviar SE16
• Optical: Pioneer Blu-Ray
• PSU: 1000W Thermaltake Toughpower
• OS: Windows 7 x64