Introduction

I remember very well that when I tested the 790GX chipset one year and a half ago I was pleasantly surprised by the attractiveness of a dead silent workstation. In contrary to the silence I experienced before, it wasn't accompanied by the soothing sound of 12V fans averaging 3500RPM ... no, I actually had to check (and double-check) if the system was still running. Of course, that silence came at a price: the 3D performance in particular wasn't that fantastic and it took me a bit of overclocking to make Crysis run somewhat fluent. Obviously, these things are not meant for gaming.

Just a few months ago, Intel released its Clarkdale processor. Nothing new, you'd wrongly assume, be it that this architecture comes in the shape of only 32nm and has a (note: 45nm) graphics processing core in the CPU package. Needless to say that the decrease in size and the integration of what used to be a separate chipset meant that less cooling was necessary to keep the system temperature under contole. And less cooling means less noise. Let's recap what we mentioned in the conclusive thoughts of that review:

... whereas Intel's Core i5 661 is far from the high-end top model of their technology, the Phenom II X4 965 is in fact the best AMD CPU available at this moment. Judging from the results however, both products are in fact pretty similar in performance ... when it comes to gaming, the difference between the Core i5 661 and the 785G's HD4200 is not that big, especially when you increase the clock frequency of the HD4200, which can be easily done even without increasing the voltage ... in terms of single threaded performance, the Clarkdale has no problem keeping up with and sometimes beating the AMD Phenom II X4 ... in multi-threaded applications, the true quad core nature of the 965 outperforms the Clarkdale clearly, which leaves us with the conclusion that although the Clarkdale may be faster for lightly threaded applications, for heavily multi-threaded applications you should opt for the Phenom II.

(~ "Intel Clarkdale vs AMD Phenom II with 785G – Mainstream Showdown")

Using this quote, we can get to business by going over the changes in this new chipset. To start with: it's identical to the 785G, but with an updated (read: overclocked) graphics core and native support for SATA 6GB.

And that's it.

No major revision changes, no major technology or architecture changes ... no, for that we'll have to wait for the next processor paradigm shift coming with the Bulldozer somewhere in 2011. Now, before we start testing the Bulldozer, let's have a look at the 890GX sample on our test bench.

MSI 890GXM-G65:

When MSI contacted to review this sample, they asked me to talk about the following concepts: Military Class concept, OC Genie Lite and HTPC. The first one I'm not going to talk about as this is the field of marketing and not the field of reviewing, the second one I could talk about since it kind of deals with overclocking, but from experience I've learned that although the implementation of this technology does work, it's always better to do the overclocking yourself because of the safety issues involved with this kind of features. After all, the OC Genie Lite promises one-button stable overclocking and that promise cannot be broken, which means that in comparison to your own overclock, this feature will choose for less MHz and more Voltage.

The third subject is, obviously, something I will talk about. Not only because of the size of this mainboard (m-ATX), but also because I very recently tested the Clarkdale IGP technology in which I mentioned in the conclusion that AMD should just increase the clock frequencies of the 785G to match the 3D performance of the Clarkdale. It almost looks like they listened to me! ;-)

Test setup

Massman's Review Hardware
CPU	Intel Core i5 661 AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE
Cooling	CoolerMaster V8 Sunbeamtech Core-Contact Freezer OCZ Freeze cooling paste
Mainboard	Intel DH55TC MSI 890GXM-G65
Videocard	"see: cpu and mainboard section"
Memory	4x2GB Corsair Dominator 1600MHz CL8-8-8-24 1.65V, v3.1 (p/n: CMD8GX3M4A1600C8)
Storage	Western Digital WD3200KS Acard ANS-9010
PSU	Antec Truepower 1KW

Test Methodology :

To test the performance, we used the following benchmarks.

Cinebench 10: Single and Multi CPU

Hexus Pifast

Lavalys Everest: Read, Write, Copy and Latency

PCMark05: System, CPU, Memory, Graphics and HDD subtest

Resident Evil 5: 1280x720x32bit, no quality

SuperPi 1M and 32M

TechArp X264

Winrar

Wprime 32M and 1024M

Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit.

Next to that, we ran each configuration at two different settings: stock and overclocked to 3.8GHz. For the overclocked settings, we prefer to refer to the screenshots underneath showing the different test settings. Please note that we have optimised the Phenom II test setup in the overclocked test setting by increasing the IGP clock frequency and tuning the HT Link and NB frequency. All configurations are useable 24/7, so no extreme overclocking here.

Intel Core i5 661 configuration - Left: 3.40GHz (turbo), right: 3.80GHz


(Click to enlarge)

For the stock comparison, we enabled turbo mode as this a feature of the Intel processor. Since this Intel mainboard offered little to no bios options to tune our configuration, we just increase the BCLK as high as possible. No alterations were performed to tune the memory or graphics processor subsystem. At the moment of testing, no GPU-Z was available that was able to correctly show the GPU specifications.

AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE + 890GX configuration - Left: 3.20GHz, right: 3.80GHz


(Click to enlarge)

As you can see, we have increase the GPU clock frequency to 950MHz in the overclocked test setting. Also, please make a note of the 1600CL8 8GB memory configuration: handling 8GB of memory isn't the most easy task to do, but both the mainboards as the memory itself gave us very little problems when tuning.

AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE + 785G configuration - Left: 3.20GHz, right: 3.80GHz

Note: since we did not have the same 785G configuration at our disposal, no 785G at all for that matter. So, we have included the performance numbers of the same configuration (CPU/MEM), but outdated drivers, to show you 'where we come from'. Purely for reference, in other words.


(Click to enlarge)

Cinebench R10



Cinebench is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. Cinebench is based on Maxon's award-winning animation software Cinema 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. Maxon software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. Cinebench is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It's completely free.



The 890GX chipset does improve the single threaded performance a tad, but the Phenom is still not getting close to the Clarkdale. In multi-threaded environment the true nature of a quad core clearly wins from a dual core with HT technology.

Lavalys Everest



Everest Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EverestTechnology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems. Furthermore, complete software, operating system and security information makes Everest Ultimate Edition a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.



The memory bandwidth throughput is overall pretty much the same on all platforms, although noted that the Intel platform had a lower memory frequency. In the end, the Intel platform is capable of reaching much higher frequencies, so with a bit of fine-tuning you should be able to get higher ratings.



The latency is, of course, heavily affected by the non-ability to alter the memory timings in the bios of the Intel DH55TC mainboard.

PCMark05



PCMark05 is everything you need to reliably and easily measure the performance of your PC and determine its strengths and weaknesses. With PCMark05, you will be able to select the optimal upgrades for your existing PC, or choose the right new PC that fits your specific needs. This easy-to-use product gives you the same tools and knowledge that virtually every professional tester in the industry uses.



All three platforms perform pretty much on par which each other, although the 890GX seems to have improved the HDD throughput. This chart shows, however, that upgrading from either Clarkdale or 785G is not really necessary.

Hexus Pifast

Hexus Pifast is an old-skool benchmark program that stresses both the CPU as the memory subsystem.



Although still trailing the Clarkdale, the 890GX seems to have closed the gap just a little bit.

Resident Evil 5

This utility initially was released to test out the performance of Resident Evil 5 using the Nvidia's 3D Vision stereoscopic technology, it's however not a requirement to check it out.

From the ashes of old conflicts, a new terror arises. The Umbrella Corporation and its crop of lethal viruses have been destroyed and contained. But a new, more dangerous threat has emerged. Years after surviving the events in Raccoon City, Chris Redfield has been fighting the scourge of bio-organic weapons all over the world.

Now a member of the Bio-terrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSSA), Chris is sent to Africa to investigate a biological agent that is transforming the populace into aggressive and disturbing creatures. Joined by another local BSSA agent, Sheva Alomar, the two must work together to solve the truth behind the disturbing turn of events. Featuring a revolutionary new co-op mode of gameplay, Resident Evil 5 will let players experience fear together as terror moves out of the shadows and into the light of day.



In the DX9 test setting the 890GX has managed to beat the Clarkdale GMA HD, whereas in the DX10 setting it's still behind. Do note that the 890GX is (given the higher clock frequencies) quite a bit faster than the 785G.

SuperPI

SuperPI is, just as Pifast quite an old benchmark application that stresses the CPU (1M) and the memory subsystem (32M).





The AMD platform is still a lot behind the Intel Clarkdale.

TechArp X264

Simply put, it is a reproducible measure of fast your machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. It's nice because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The video encoder (x264) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other.

What's x264? It's more or less the next generation Xvid/DivX codec.

You'll notice that the whole thing is pretty simplistic since I have no programming skills to speak of. The test simply consists of the needed executable and the video file all driven by a batch file that'll kick off the x264 encode and write a "results.txt" that you can upload along with your machine specs for comparison purposes.



The true quadcore of AMD's Phenom II X4 is showing it's power against the dual core Clarkdale. In comparison to the 785G, it seems that the 890GX is even a tad better.

Winrar

WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format.



Again, the 890GX is a bit better than the 785G

Wprime

Wprime is a multi-threaded benchmark application that measures the performance of a multi-core CPU.





Because of the native 4 cores, the AMD platform is a tad faster than Intel's Clarkdale solution (which offers HT).

Evaluation

The 890GX certainly is an improvement over the older 785G and 790GX chipsets, but it's not a shockingly big difference. The main reason why you opt for a 890GX powered board for a new build is to future proof your system with Sata 6Gbps and USB 3.0 capabilities, if you are own a 785G/790GX system the question is whether you should upgrade or not, since those two features are exploited by current generation hardware.

When it comes to 3D performance, the HD4290 is actually exactly what we expected from AMD: an increase in clock frequency to match the Intel GMA HD performance. Nothing more, really ... no DX11, no increase in sideport memory size, so again we have to ask ourselves the question: is it worth to upgrade from 785G to 890GX?

Another problem with the 890GX is that the price is 30~40% higher than the one of a regular 785G. Ok, agreed, it's probably because there's only a very select amount of boards available, but the price difference is a lot. Looking at the H55 products, we notice a difference of roughly 10 to 15%, in favor of the H55. I think it's quite easy to jump to the right conclusion?

Now, concerning the 890GXM-G65 mainboard. To be honest, every time a new mainboard lands on my desk, I expect it to have huge flaws. In the recent past, I've done a lot of troubleshooting and beta-testing for boards and I do understand better how difficult it is to get a board just right from the absolute beginning ... sometimes it all goes well, but sometimes the flaws are innumerable. Now, in this case, I have to say that I was surprised about the quality of the bios and the board in general. No, I did not have to spend an entire night prowling through the bios to find the right combination to get 8GB working ... no, first boot everything worked perfectly stable. The test sessions with this board went smoothly and I have no reason to complain about anything.

MSI 890GXM-G65



Conclusive thoughts

No award? Not for the board or the chipset or the this particular model? First of all, in contrary to some other hardware reviewing websites, we prefer to only hand out awards when a product really stands out against the competition. And for that to work, we need to test similar products and make the actual comparison. Now, having tested 0 other 890GX mainboards, I can't tell if the 890GXM-G65 stands out against the rest, but unless the other boards give me 6GHz on air cooling or a 1500MHz IGP, I'm quite confident that this is a solid product and certainly worth to consider when going for an AMD-based HTPC.

Speaking of HTPC ... is the 890GX worth to consider? Well ... yes and no. No, because at the moment the mainboards are a tad too expensive and don't offer any features, performance or anything else that justifies the higher price. Do note, however, that the 890GX is actually released for something else than the current Deneb: the 6-core'd Thuban, which will be released end of April.

Since Intel's hexacore is priced a rather 'conservative' €1000, building a small yet powerful HTPC or desktop PC will have to be using one of those Thubans, coming at < €300 for the most high-end product. Actually, it's probably a pity that these 890GX's were released so long before the arrival of the Thuban since it doesn't make sense to buy one now for your quadcore. So, if you have one month left, I seriously recommend you to hold off the purchases for the HTPC and wait for the arrival of Thuban. And then you can buy a brand-new 890GX as well ...

When Thuban arrives, we'll re-evaluate the HTPC capabilities of the 890GX for sure.

To end with, I'd like to thank the following people for providing the hardware and support. Without these people Madshrimps (and I) would never be able to provide you this content.

AMD (Steeve): for providing the Phenom II X4 965

Corsair (Gareth): for providing the Dominator memory

MSI (Nick): for providing the MSI 890GXM-G65

OCZ Technology (Tobias): for providing the batch of OCZ Freeze cooling paste

TONES (Manu): for always being ready to provide hardware where necessary