ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 Motherboard Review

On-Board Peripherals

AMD 890GX chipset is a dual-chip solution and we’ve already published all the main specs from this chipset on the first page of this review.

As we mentioned earlier, AMD 890GX is the first chipset to natively support SATA-600 ports and ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 provides all the six SATA-600 ports supported by the chipset. These ports support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.

Even though the chipset supports one parallel ATA (PATA, a.k.a. IDE) port, on this motherboard the ATA-133 port available is controlled by a JMicron JMB361 chip, which also controls an eSATA-300 port available on the motherboard rear panel.

The ATA-133 port and two of the SATA-600 ports are placed on the motherboard edge rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them. The other SATA ports are placed where expansion cards won’t block them as well.

Figure 6: SATA-600 and ATA-133 ports.

No floppy disk drive controller is present.

From the 14 USB 2.0 ports supported by the chipset, ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 offers 12 of them, four soldered on the rear panel and eight available through four headers on the motherboard.

One of the highlights of this motherboard is the presence of two USB 3.0 ports, controlled by a NEC μPD720200 chip. These ports are available on the rear panel of the product and painted blue (USB 2.0 ports are black).

Additionally ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 comes with a FireWire (IEEE 1394) controller, providing two FireWire ports, one soldered on the rear panel and one available through a header. The motherboard doesn’t come with an I/O bracket for you to use the second FireWire port. So if you decide to buy this motherboard, it is a good idea to buy a case with four USB ports and one FireWire port, so you can use all available ports.

Audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec. Unfortunately this component isn’t listed on Realtek’s website and the motherboard manual doesn’t talk about the technical features of this chip, so we can’t comment on the quality of the on-board audio from this motherboard. The board has an SPDIF optical connector soldered on the rear panel. A coaxial SPDIF output can be added by installing the appropriate adapter on the motherboard “SPDIF_OUT” header (this adapter doesn’t come with the product).

ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by a Realtek RTL8111E chip, which is connected to the system using a PCI Express x1 lane and thus not presenting any potential performance issues.

In Figure 7, you can see the motherboard rear panel with PS/2 keyboard connector, four USB 2.0 ports (black ones), optical SPDIF output, HDMI output, VGA output, DVI-D output, FireWire port, eSATA-300 port, Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports (blue ones) and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 7: Motherboard rear panel.

As you can see, this motherboard comes with three video connectors, but only two of them can be used at the same time. There is no PS/2 mouse connector, so your mouse must be USB.

ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 also has a legacy serial port available through a header on the motherboard besides the 24-pin power supply connector. In order to use it you will need an I/O bracket that doesn’t come with the product.