AMD's recent Phenom II X6 launch has arguably put the company back in the game in the eyes of some enthusiasts, but what motherboard should you pair a new AMD CPU with? We take a look at ASUS' M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 which makes use of AMD's newest 890GX chipset (complete with integrated graphics) and SB850 south bridge, topped off with CPU core unlocking functionality and USB 3.0 support. That makes for lots of tasty buzzwords, but how is the actual motherboard itself?

Despite the large leap in nomenclature, the basic configuration of the 890GX mirrors that of its direct predecessor the 785G exactly - Indeed, it's actually the same 55 nanometre, 200 million transistor chip, albeit speed binned to ensure that any 890GX parts are the cream of their respective crop. These means that what we have here is an AM3 socket supporting part which can handle up to DDR3-1333MHz officially, with sixteen PCI Express 2.0 lanes reserved for graphics (with support for two electrical 8x slots for a CrossFire configuration if needed) and six PCI Express 2.0 lanes for other devices.

The reason for this speed binning we just mentioned is all about those integrated graphics, allowing the 890GX to sport a GPU labelled the Radeon HD 4290 by AMD - This GPU supports DirectX 10.1 with a core clock speed of 700MHz (compared to 500MHz for the 785G's GPU), while holding the same complement of forty Stream Processors as its predecessor, complete with the same UVD 2.0 video decoding engine with support for dual-stream decoding and a full complement of video outputs (minus audio bitstreaming sadly, although audio pass-through for HDMI remains intact). Although the Radeon HD 4290 shares system memory for its frame buffer, this part also features 128MB of DDR-1333 for its Sideport cache, designed to improve performance by offering the GPU at least some dedicated memory to work with.