Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H Motherboard Review – AMD 890GX

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The AMD 890GX-based motherboards that we looked at here today are both very solid motherboards and increase the level of performance that you can expect from an AMD motherboard. The faster and improved Radeon HD 4290 integrated graphics are more than enough to power your HTPC for Blu-ray playback and can even manage to do some light gaming on lower resolution. By adding in a Radeon HD 5870 graphics card like we did you find a very solid gaming platform that has all the latest features on the market, like SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps. Our testing showed that USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps offer significant performance improvements and should be considered for a system that you are building and planning on hanging onto for years to come.

The Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H Motherboard has an MSRP of $139.99, which means not only is this platform better than the previous 790FX/790GX platforms, but it costs roughly the same price. If you are building an AMD system today then you pretty much have no choice than to go with an 890GX motherboard. The ASUS motherboard that we benchmarked in this review was the ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 and it has an MSRP of $155, but they also have a version of the same board without the USB 3.0 NEC controller that will retail for $145.

• ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 – $155
• ASUS M4A89GTD Pro – $145
• Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H – $140

As you can see, each of the boards is priced nicely in the market and should sell well among those building AMD systems. We will be doing an in-depth review of that board in the future so keep
an eye out for it.

In closing, the Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H motherboard really impressed us. We got solid performance numbers on it compared to another 890GX motherboard and in some cases they were better and the board costs $15 less. The Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H also was easy to overclock, had a great layout and all the features we would consider a must for building a platform in 2010. AMD has done a great job with the 890GX and SB850 and all the hard work has paid off thanks to boards like the Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H! Bring on the Phenom II X6 ‘Thuban’ processors as we have the boards now to put them to good use!

Legit Bottom Line: The Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H is a solid performing motherboard that is based on the AMD 890GX chipset!