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Page 1 of 4   AMD’s 790GX chipset together with the ATI Radeon HD 3300 graphics card has been an excellent choice for those who wished for gaming in lower resolutions, couldn’t afford an expensive discreet graphics solution and wanted to experience all advantages the 790GX offered over the 780G. AMD hasn’t stopped there and presented the market with the 890GX chipset, which can be deemed the successor to the throne of the good old 790GX. The 890GX comes in combo with the SB850 southbridge, just like the 790GX was followed by the SB750. Other than a different southbridge, the main difference between 890GX and 790GX is the new graphics chip, ATI Radeon 4290, which supports DirectX 10.1 and the core of which is clocked at 700 MHz, unlike its predecessor which was clocked at 500 MHz.
The differences don’t cease there, since the sideport memory used exclusively for the graphics card is now of DDR3 type, which means higher clocks than the previously used DDR2 one. All of this brought a performance improvement of over 30%, which is certainly a nice treat. Technologies such as Hybrid Graphics, ATI Stream, ATI UVD and so on are still present, which means that you’ll be able to enjoy high-definition films, as well as video material conversion via GPU. The number of PCI Express lines doesn’t seem to have been increased, as both PCI-E slots still share 16 lines, which means that the GPUs will be working in x8 mode when in Crossfire regime. The new southbridge brings support for SATA 3, which offers a theoretical throughput twice the size of SATA 2, i.e. 6 Gb/s. This sort of support is more on the theoretical side of things at the moment, as SATA 3 devices are scarce on the market and very few SSDs can overcome SATA 2 specifications. As far as the number of SATA connectors is concerned, it’s limited to six on the SB850 as well, just like the SB750 was.
The maximum number of USB 2.0 ports has been increased from 12 (on the predecessor) to 14 on the SB850. Although unrelated to the chipset itself, some motherboard models based on the 890GX will come equipped with USB 3.0 ports as well, courtesy of NEC’s D720200 chip. Another thing to be well-noted is the fact that the southbridge finally integrates support for gigabit LAN, which was not the case on any of the previous models.
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