The SB850 Southbridge

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 to actually implement 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.

SATA protocol adds one start bit and one stop bit, for 10 binary digits per 8-bit byte aka "10/8" protocol. Therefore, typically we get 3,000 Mbit/s : 10 = 300 MB/sec bandwidth minus tolerances, overhead, etc. SATA/6G doubles that, so we get 6,000 Mbit/sec : 10 = 600 MB/sec of available bandwidth for storage devices. Also, the amount of parallelism achieved by the Southbridge will have a big impact on the performance of RAID arrays, particularly RAID 0, using 6G data channels.

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 from the updated SATA interface.

The early adoption of SATA 6G is a bold yet extremely good move from AMD.

There's more to the SB850 though, it will now allow you to connect up-to 14 USB 2.0 devices, it 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 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.

So we have received several 890GX motherboards a while ago, I wanted to show you what to expect, and of course we'll then dive into a performance overview of the new chipset combined with a Phenom II X6 1095T processor. Let's start off in this review with the motherboard BIOS and then head onwards to a detailed photo shoot.