Asus M4A89TD Pro Motherboard Review

Performance Analysis

Memory performance is excellent and SATA and USB 2 are solid performers too - USB 2 in particular is the highest we've seen from an AMD system yet - although we also tested eSATA out of curiosity, we found it to be a dismal 97.1MB/s: less than 50 per cent of the performance of the main SATA ports.

As for productivity performance, despite the poor overall score, the Asus actually does pretty well in the image editing and video encoding tests, it's just the multi-tasking performance was consistently way behind the competition that brings it all crashing down. Even the Asus 890GX board we tested recently produced a better result.

That said, the Asus performas well when overclocked. It performed in line with the MSI 890GX but dropped 100 or so points behind the MSI 890FX and Asus 890GX boards. This is despite its comparatively high core clock speed and higher CPU-northbridge frequency than the rest of the boards tested.

Gaming performance is not bad; mid-table with just a frame or two per second off the Asus 890GX and MSI 890FX boards.

Conclusion

On the upside the Asus board overclocks very well and it's much more receptive to ramping up the HyperTransport frequency than the MSI 890FX. Unlocking the extra CPU cores works great if the CPU offers it, and the "Turbo Key II" function alone is almost making us want one.

Almost.

The grit between our teeth is that we know Asus can design great motherboards , so why the numerous layout issues? For a company that has put so much thought into the engineering of some of the features, surely it takes respectively much less time to look at what was good in the layout of previous motherboards and use the same principles?

Unfortunately we suspect that it's the big brandable differences that sell, not putting all your components in a row so the cables sit neatly.

So on one hand we've got useful features: a great BIOS, Asus AutoTuning, Evo-this, Turbo Key-that, MemOK'd etc, that goes above what most motherboards offer. But all that is bolted into a very ordinary board that could have been so much better, yet should not cost any more. It's frustrating for us, but even if you don't care for the niggles, then we have to wonder where all that performance potential is going?

And finally we come to the price. Given the features - no USB 3, only two 16x PCI-E slots, no extra SATA - we expected this to top, at most, £140. So at £160 then, you've got to seriously be wondering why you'd buy one over the extremely capable Asus 890GX, or, better value 790FX even. It's somewhat better than the Crossair IV Formula for what's on offer, that's even then, it's still not good value for money.

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 4/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

Score Guide