The SB850 Southbridge

The new Southbridge is a nice update over the older SB7x0 series. The Southbridge ASIC is always used for peripheral connectivity like your HDDs, audio, USB, PATA and so on.  The biggest changes then. Well firstly, we see the first chipset vendor actually implementing SATA 6G (SATA3), this new update of your SATA connectors will increase the bandwidth on the SATA controller from 3 towards 6 GBit/sec. Now for regular HDDs that is not really very important. But with the tremendous rise of fast SSD drives this really is a large plus. Typically we get 3000 Mbit/s : 8 = 375 MB/sec bandwidth minus tolerances and random occurrences. SATA3 is doubling it up, as such we get 6000 Mbit/sec : 8 = 750 MB/sec of available bandwidth for your storage devices. As you can understand, with SSDs getting faster and faster that's just a much warmed and welcomed increase of bandwidth. Also do not forget RAID performance, which can see massive benefits of the updated SATA interface.

There's more to the SB850 though, it will now allow you to connect up-to 14 USB 2.0 devices, of course comes with support for PATA and 8 channel HD Audio and the old fashioned PCI interface, but new is the inclusion of a 1000/100/10 Mbit/s Ethernet. And all these facts combined, allow any ODM to make a very diverse motherboard with the usage of just the AMD 890GX chipset. Literally, you pop in memory, a processor, an HDD and a PSU and you'd already have a fully functional and extremely diverse PC. So with the new chipset, AMD can address any market whether that is entry level, mainstream or when you pop in high-speed DDR3 and a dedicated graphics card ... high-end.

ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3

So this Socket AM3-ready board comes equipped with a core unlocking function, it gets the TurboV overclocking feature, includes the Express Gate instant-on OS, and comes with four DDR3 memory slots. Noticeable are the two USB 3.0 connectors, 7.1 channel audio, a FireWire port, Gigabit Ethernet, as well as D-Sub, DVI and HDMI outputs.

So in respect of specs and features the ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 has all the kit on it you'll ever need, including USB 3.0, SATA 3.0, and support for AM3 CPUs including the 6 core ones and external SATA. ASUS has included a variety of options for the Tweaker including that Core Unlocker (some CPU models have one or two cores disabled like the Phenom II X3 720BE, this feature allows you to unlock and activate the fourth core).

Once you sift through the BIOS though you'll notice that you can also tweak really well. Faster clocked or timed memory is not an issue. Though the mainboard lays emphasis on support for multi-GPU configurations, it really is not suited for it though as you lack the multitude of PCIEs lanes needed. One dedicated graphics card at x16 lanes however will work just great.

But talk is cheap though, let's have a look at the ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 in detail with the help of a product gallery.