Introduction
AMD make available its latest chipsets for the AMD series of
processors. The new chipset named AMD 890GX is the north bridge and it will be
paired with the south bridge SB850.
The new AMD 890GX chipset integrates Radeon HD 4290 DX10.1 graphics which runs
at 700MHz with sideport memory support. The 890GX comes with a RV620 core with
40 unified Shaders, a 64/128 bit memory interface. It supports ATI AVIVO HD and
UVD 2.0.
With the new Radeon HD 4290, it can upscale your DVD video to HD quality
(DVD->HD, 480p->720p). It also support the latest Blu Ray 1.1 features like
Picture in Picture. It can also support multi monitor capability & DVI, HDMI and
DisplayPort outputs (depending on motherboard configuration). With AVIVO, it
also enables accelerated simulataneous video playback. The chipset also support
ATi Stream technology and an additional of 2 PCIe slots for CrossFire X with
external graphics cards.
An added feature is that web rendering now is 2x faster with AMD 890GX on
FireFox 3.7 alpha. This feature Direct2D acceleration with AMD hardware
acceleration technology. Time elasped for to load game.amd.com took completed in
half the time with Direct2D enabled (500 times at 3538ms) vs disabled (500 times
at 7327ms).
With SB850, AMD brings native SATA 6Gbps support to AMD boards. With its 890GX
chipset with PCIe 2.0 support, it has ample bandwidth to support the NEC USB 3.0
controller with 500MB/s in contrast to half the bandwidth on H55/H57 chipset for
Intel Clarkdale.
In fact, in terms of cost/performance ratio, the AMD solution (board+chipset+processor)
is way cheaper than the Intel H55 solution.
On next page, we compare an
ASUS AMD 890GX board with Phenom II X3 710 (unlocked to 4 cores) CPU clocked at
254x13 (3.3GHz) versus a ASUS P7H55-M Pro running Core i5 661.
