Let’s take a look at one of the motherboards based on the AMD 890GX chipset released by ASRock, featuring SATA-600 and USB 3.0 ports and three PCI Express x16 slots.

We have already posted a detailed comparison between AMD chipsets with integrated video. In summary, AMD 890GX graphics engine has the same basic specs as AMD 790GX’s, but being a DirectX 10.1 part, not a pure DirectX 10 part as its older brother. The main difference on AMD 890GX is the use of a new south bridge chip, called SB850. This south bridge chip natively supports SATA-600 ports (a.k.a. “SATA 6 G”) and in fact this is the first chipset to arrived on the market with this feature (currently on motherboards based on other chipsets featuring SATA-600 ports an external controller chip must be used).

So far ASRock released two models based on AMD 890GX: 890GX Extreme3, which is the model we are taking a look, and 890GM Pro3. We created a table showing the main differences between these two products. As you can see 890GX Extreme3 is a more complete model, using the ATX form factor, while 890GM Pro3 is a microATX product. Both use only solid Japanese capacitors, but 890GX Extreme3 uses a better voltage regulator (10+1 phases against 4+1 on 890GM Pro3). Both have 128 MB “SidePort” memory.

In Figure 1 you can have an overall look from ASRock 890GX Extreme3.

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Figure 1: ASRock 890GX Extreme 3 motherboard.

As mentioned, this motherboard has 128 MB video memory soldered on the motherboard. In Figure 2, you can see the 1 Gbit GDDR3-1333 chip (1 Gbit = 128 MB) in charge of this feature.

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Figure 2: 128 MB GDDR3-1333 memory chip.