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The crown for best integrated graphics processor (IGP) goes back to AMD with the 890GX chipset and its Radeon 4290 onboard. This is also the first consumer chipset to become available for six-core processors. The new six-core Phenom II X6 line (codenamed Thuban) is expected to be launched soon by AMD, and will use the same socket used by AMD currently - AM3 with DDR3 RAM. You can feel secure buying one of these boards with a budget processor today knowing that you can upgrade to a six-core processor whenever you can fit it into your budget. AMD has also taken a long-term view and baked support for SATA 6Gbps into its latest motherboard series, never mind that SATA 3.0 hard drives have barely started making an appearance in the market. This is significant considering that Intel's latest P55/H55/H57 chipsets do not natively support the latest SATA and USB standards.

The pricing of the new line is quite aggressive as well, so if you are going to purchase a new desktop PC today based on an AMD processor, a motherboard based on an 890GX chipset is the best choice. As the base for the next round of motherboards for AMD processors, it managed to do a darned good job while we put a sample board through its paces. The IGP is a Radeon 4290, with an optional 128MB of "SidePort" memory to call its own, and offers the best onboard graphics we've seen on desktops so far. The southbridge or the SB850 packs a punch, with a lot of hitherto premium features including 7.1 HD Audio and support for six SATA ports (6Gbps) for disk storage in RAID 0/1/5/10/JBOD modes.

The IGP on AMD's 890GX (Radeon HD 4290) differs from that of the older 785G (Radeon HD 4200) in terms of clock-speed, but still supports only DirectX 10.1. Suffice to say that the performance seen with this IGP was better than any other IGP out there. The graphics integrated onto the Intel Core i5-661 did do slightly better in a few tests, but the 890GX still beats it on the whole. A plus point in the favour of AMD is that in India atleast, the platform (Motherboard + Processor) can be purchased at a lower price than a similar combination from the Intel camp. In terms of the broad outlines and performance, we did not see huge changes between the preceding 790GX generation of motherboards, and the current 890GX board. Perhaps the other upcoming 800-series chipsets might differ – 890FX at the high-end may offer more goodies and 880G for budget consumers might sell at a lower price, but we do not know details of those just yet.

What we do know is that the performance of this chipset's memory and storage sub-systems is good. You can see a few performance numbers in the next page. We have also reviewed one of the first motherboards based on the 890GX chipset - the Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H.