We are finally witness to the release of a new chipset from AMD, the 890GX, which brings several new innovations to AMD systems.  The most noticeable and also the most disappointing is the support for USB 3.0 and SATA 6G.  In Josh’s testing the SB850 southbridge would not recognize his SATA 2 HDD properly and limited it to SATA 150 and even still that performance was not up to Intel’s.  On the plus side there is now a pair of PCI-E 2.0 lanes ensuring plenty of bandwidth for USB 3.0 and SATA 6G, once they sort out the issues.  To find out more about the transfer rates and what the onboard HD4290 GPU is capable of, read Josh’s full review.

“The addition of native SATA 6G support should have been a giant addition to the chipset. Unfortunately, my testing has shown initial issues with this implementation. AMD has been kicked around for a long time for their southbridge I/O performance in USB and SATA, and the SB850 continues that not-so-proud tradition. I do not know if this is simply a BIOS issue, or new drivers need to be sent along, but when even SATA 1 and 2 performance are down in the dumps compared to the previous generation, a lot of questions should be asked of AMD.”

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