Final Words & Conclusion
With the 890GPA-UD3H Gigabyte offers a rock-solid motherboard, a great feature set and some very decent tweakability as well.
It does offer just as much functionality as the competition does, but then some more. I mention tweakability here as we lifted the new six-core 1095T Phenom II X6 processor over whopping 4 GHz on a 35 USD OCZ Vendetta cooler. That's just nice.
With the 890GX you get to have some more features and compatibility over the previous 785 chipset, let's talk about that for a second. Not only will you be ready for the upcoming 6-core Phenom II X6 processors, the chipset also harbors a slightly faster IGP within the Northbridge, it's a daunting similar (and in fact is) to AMD785 though, but sure, it offers the benefit of UVD 2.0 and armed with 40 Shader processors that simply opens up gateways to proper post-process of high-definition video. Especially with software like Media Player Classic Home Cinema, edition this is a tremendous feature.
So the Northbridge SB890GX ASIC definitely is pretty much the AMD 785 Northbridge with a few tweaks, but we do see a very nice update for the Southbridge. The SB850 can now support up-to 14 USB 2.0 devices, it has an embedded Gigabit Ethernet and the most prominent feature is of course the support of six SATA 6G storage devices, and that my friends is the sweet butter on top of the waffle. By doing so AMD is separating itself from Intel and takes a large step forward.
What I like about this motherboard is that Gigabyte added a NEC USB 3.0 chip, thus creating two USB 3.0 posts on a 115 EUR motherboard, that's just nice, that feature is saving you on your money.
Much like any other 890GX based motherboard, this 890GPA-UD3H is an awesome net PC, it's a great desktop and work PC that is quite power efficient while delivering good performance. The wide connectivity (monitor output), feature set and embedded IGP make this motherboard a truly excellent HTPC as well. You can go nuts as the package has plenty of features and performance to deal properly with high-definition content.
Gamers then, if you pop in a fast quad or six-core processor and insert a dedicated graphics cards like the Radeon HD 5850 series or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 then you'd created a very good symbiosis and platform to game on, at relative low cost. We do feel though that one high-end graphics card should be the limit. Use two (which this motherboard supports) and the PCIe lanes will already divide up in x8:x8 which does not make much sense for high-
end gaming. Again the board offers a lot, the combination of SATA 6G will make sure your RAID is as fast as can be, and current and future SSDs will receive the bandwidth they deserve alright.
So then, there's very little negative to report on this motherboard. Good feature set, great performance, very compatible with the latest gear, it comes with SATA3 and USB 3.0 and a decent set of options when it comes to tweaking, yeah at 115 EUR we can highly recommend the 890GPA-UD3H as a very solid purchase.
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