AMD's 890GX Chipset - Same Graphics, Better South Bridge
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 2, 2010 4:36 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Say Goodbye to ACC, Say Hello to ASUS
One thing AMD neglected to mention in its press presentation about the 8-series chipset was the fact that it removed support for Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) from AMD’s BIOS. You may remember that ACC was the nifty tool that first let us overclock Phenom processors higher, but later allowed us to unlock disabled cores on Phenom II X2, X3 and Athlon II X3 processors. You heard it right, apparently ACC is gone.
Well, not exactly. Apparently ASUS has figured out a way to unlock cores despite not having easy access to whatever it is ACC did. And you have three ways to enable it:
1) Turn this switch on:
Technically it's the switch to the right of this one, but you get the point
2) Hold the “4” key during POST
3) Or enable it in the BIOS
Nifty. As far as I can tell, ASUS and ASRock are the only companies implementing ACC at this point. I suspect the rest will follow once they figure out how to do it.
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semo - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
I'm not aware if the motherboard header pin configurations for USB 3.0 have been standardized yet. I'm sure there will be a period when every maker will come up with their own design until we settle on a single oneglockjs - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
i don't feel so bad in being impatient and buying one of the gigabyte 333's...790xta to be exact. looks like i didnt miss much :Dsemilobster - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Great review Anand! When can we expect a review of the new Hybrid-Crossfire with the 5450? How did they make this work? So far Hybrid-Crossfire has only worked with other RV610 based GPUs (the RV620 was just a slightly modified RV610)Spoelie - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Extremely disappointed. Still the uncompetitive SATA performance, no USB3, no ACC and the same integrated graphics performance we had back in 2007, 2 and a half years ago.For a company that's behind on cpu performance and tries (tried?) to push the platform "advantage", this is one lackluster platform. It's like they've given up altogether.
I've had AMD systems for the past years, but 2010 seems to be time to switch, and it pains me :(
Alouette Radeon - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
Let me see if I understand this correctly. You're going to switch to the criminal organization known as Intel because AMD hasn't upgraded their SATA? You're kidding right? No spinning hard drive today can keep up with the SATA speeds as they are except for SSDs and you're whining about that? Don't even get me started on the fact that the Radeon HD 4290 is still the top performing IGP with DX10.1 added. Do you really think you'd prefer an Intel GMA??? My god, what rock do you live under? Just for ideological purposes alone, I won't touch Intel or nVidia until they clean themselves up. Dishonesty in a corporation pisses me off more than anything and if you've seen the way Intel has conducted itself in the last 10 years you wouldn't be so quick to switch. Sure, switch to Intel, increase their market share, let AMD die and then we'll all be happy with Intel having a monopoly and dictating to us what we get as they slow technological advancement down and raise prices on everything all because you felt inadequate without SATA performance numbers that are meaningless because there's no hard drives that can take advantage of them! With knuckleheads like you in the world, it's no wonder we're where we are today!AznBoi36 - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
I don't really see a problem with AMD's platform. Sure their SATA performance isn't as great as Intels; but like Anand said - as long as you aren't running the latest SSDs then the SATA performance difference between AMD/Intel is negligible.And yeah, these guys are sitting on their asses as far as chipsets go. How long has ICH/r10 been out? A long time now. I'm still waiting for 8 SATA ports with RAID6. That's probably a long time coming though.
If you want ACC, then you can still pick up an older 790/785 board. Even my old Gigabyte MA785GM-US2H has it. The only benefit I see with the new 890GX is if you need native SATA3 RAID and more than 2 ports (all other boards use the marvel controller and have only 2 SATA3 ports with RAID 0/1/0+1)
Mr Perfect - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link
The problem is that native SATA 6gbps for SSDs is exactly why I was interested in the 8 series. It's back to 3rd party controllers now, which gives AMD no advantage.leexgx - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link
but it does support ACC and core unlocker they had an page Just for it (did any one read all of this pre-review before posting)all that amd have done is hid the option now but it still can be done
Griswold - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Oh yea switch to where the grass has the same color because there are no more significant upgrades between platforms either...They have now all been equally lazy. And lets not talk about nvidia with their endless nfarce rebadging of chipsets from a decade gone by...
Its clear that there is no pressure in the platform business anymore. Nvidia is a joke and AMD / Intel just throw old bones at us. Get used to it. Also because "platform" is becoming more and more meaningless, except for southbridges...
Spoelie - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
I'm not saying Intel has a better platform feature wise, but it has more performance (SATA, CPU) and lower power consumption. AMD used to have a platform advantage, but the last year that was erased. There is absolutely no reason anymore, except for price, to pick AMD at this moment. And you do not want to be in that position in this industry.