MSI 890FXA-GD70 Motherboard Review - PAGE 1

With the recent arrival of the 890FX chipset, shortly after the 890GX, many motherboard manufacturers have profited off the occasion to update their top of the line AMD motherboards. Most importantly, the new chipset, featuring the SB850 southbridge, supports SATA 6Gb/s and AHCI 1.2, which will be useful for the emerging market of solid state drives. This upgrade also requires a more powerful bus between the SB850 and the rest of the system to ensure there is not bottleneck, so that's why new northbridges had to follow.

Although the 890GX has got an IGP upgrade, the 890FX has much less new. The only new part in there is the Input/Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU). Its purpose is to allow system devices to access virtual memory adressing. Virtual memory adresses are those which processes work with; they are not the real memory adresses. It is the memory controller's duty to convert virtual adresses to physical ones.

One manufactuer that has recently upgraded its top-of-the-line AMD motherboard is MSI. Previously the 790FX-GD70 since March 2009, it now becomes the 890FXA-GD70. The name has not changed much, eh? How about the board itself? This article is made to answer this question. First step is to look at the specifications.

Specifications

Specifications are courtesy of MSI at http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=prodmbspec&maincat_no=1&cat2_no=&cat3_no=&prod_no=2025