MSI 890GXM G65 review (AMD 890GX chipset) - Introduction

In the world of hardware it's often busy each half year we see new products, respins, updates and what not. One of the more surprising mainboard chipsets over the past year and a half has to be the AMD 700 series chipset. It started at 780, went to the 790 series, the entry level 700 series and a couple of months ago the latest derivative of this chipset was the AMD 785 chipset.

With the six-core Thuban processor slowly rearing it's head and new technologies like USB 3.0 and SATA 6G on the horizon, AMD needed another update to their motherboard chipset, to get it prepared for the 6-core lovin but as well as bringing support for the new interfaces.

As such they today will release the AMD 890GX chipset, the first in the 800 series. A motherboard chipset that is based of the recently introduced AMD 785 chipset, it has been slightly revised though and is now paired with the all new AMD SB850 Southbridge chip. Keywords for this chipset are more processor compatibility, better IGP performance, increased bandwidth for the new technologies, embedding a Gigabit Ethernet into the SB850 chip and what surprised us ... AMD has already added a SATA 6G controller into that SB850 chip, which was a brilliant call to make.

What many people however initially expected (yours truly included) was early adoption of USB 3.0 into this chipset as well, this is the one thing that won't be happening. But with a lot of bandwidth and interfaces available on the new chipset we'll see ODMs simply add a USB 3.0 controller chip from NEC onto their motherboard, making sure that most of the 890GX motherboards out there will get support for USB 3.0 as well. And that would make the AMD 890GX motherboards to date the most versatile, up-to date and future ready motherboards for sure.

So without further ado let's have a peek at the all new 890GX chipset from AMD, after which we'll show you an MSI retail board and a lot of tests done with this all new platform.