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Issue-One “Southbridge” AMD SB850 allowed the company to upgrade the entire line of chipsets. Upgrading is a modification of the seventh family (770, 780G, 790GX, 790FX), which resulted in the light of an eighth – 870, 880G, 890GX, 890FX. And if the “north bridge” with integrated graphics core, AMD engineers have something to do, the creative freedom for discrete chipsets, they have proved very little. However, nothing is perfect, and some work on the bridge 890FX still were. Surely the developers with some of the shortcomings 790FX chip at the hardware level, which allowed a modest increase in productivity. The fact is that any chip (chipset, processor, video core) of any manufacturer has minor errors that the user never sees, thanks to the additional program code in the drivers. And, as a rule, these errors are eliminated in the next stepping chip, resulting in an additional code is not needed, and the system works a little faster. Therefore we can say that, despite the almost complete identity specifications “northern” bridges 790FX and 890FX, the last chip – better.

The only significant difference between these “bridges” is a new version bridge compound A-Link Express 3 with a capacity of 4 GB / c. This is logical, since the “southbridge” SB850 adds support for interface SerialATA 6 Gbit / s, and the increased capacity of the disk subsystem must meet the bus bandwidth between the “south” and “north bridge”.

Purpose of chipset AMD 890FX completely changed compared to the 790FX. This chipset is still designed for high-end motherboards, which are three or four slots PCI Express x16. However, we note that in the version with four PEG-slots on each of them stands out for eight lines of tires, but thanks to the support of PCI Express v2.0 specification with double bandwidth (compared to v1.0), about any performance drop it no go.

Motherboard ASUS Crosshair IV Formula is based on chipset AMD 890FX, and, as you guessed, it is the top product in the range of AMD-cards from this manufacturer. Incidentally, the family of motherboards ASUS Crosshair Formula very rich past. In particular, the first generation of this board (more on the chipset NVIDIA) was considered the best of all AMD-products, and third-generation (already on chipset AMD 790FX) showed record results in the field of overclocking. We are therefore very interesting to see how the fourth generation motherboards ASUS Crosshair Formula will be consistent with such a high fence, given predecessors.

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