AMD 890GX SB850 Chipset Debut: Phenom II X6 Ready

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory speed to DDR3-1333 with 8,8,8,24 timings. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems  Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2010  Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2010, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the suite with AMD's 890GX chipset (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the Phenom II X4 965 processor running at its default clock speed of 3.4GHz with 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM running in dual-channel mode, using the Radeon HD 4290 IGP on Gigabyte's 890GPA-UD3H motherboard.

When paired to a Phenom II X4 965 processor, the 890GX chipset performs as expected in the various SiSoft SANDRA benchmarks that we ran. As you can see, the systems performs on par with similar reference machines in SANDRA's database, including those listed in the memory bandwidth test. Typically, an IGP will sap a bit of memory bandwidth, but the GB motherboard we used for testing is outfitted with 128MB of dedicated Sideport memory, which minimizes the IGP effect on system memory bandwidth while at the Windows desktop, or running apps that don't consume the full 128MB.