New 890GX/FX motherboard

Guys, I wanna buy a full ATX motherboard based on either 890GX/FX based chipset (1st Preference) or a very good 880G based one. There are two reason behind it:

1. My existing Gigabyte 785G UD2H is a Micro ATX one and after installing my new HD 6870, my 3 SATA ports among the 5 have been covered by that 11" monster. So unable to connect my 2 HDDs and DVD writer simultaneously.

2. Want to use a 9800GT card as dedicated PhysX card with the Nvidia Driver hack. Already got the 9800GT card from a friend.

Budget is within 10K, but cheaper is better. Try to concentrate on 890 based chipset. Going to buy @ December's end. Just found one item from SMC website, MSI 890GXM-G65. If anyone have information regarding it, please let me know.

U cant get 880g as u will use 2 cards. The msi 890gxm g65 is micro atx. The Gigabyte 890GPA UD3H @ 8k is a very good one. Nice ocer too. Its better performer than asus that costs 9.5k.

What about MSI 890FX-GD70 & GIGABYTE GA-890GPA-UD3H?

Gigabyte 890FXA UD5 better than Msi 890FXA GD70.

Guys please provide me some links to these motherboards' review and any online stores where they are available.

Check out legit reviews in googling. Ask smc if these are available.

SMC has a full range of AM3 motherboards...i saw the one mentioned by JAS and also there was 890FXA-UD7...

Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H - *www.thinkdigit.com/forum/reviews/126818-gigabyte-890gpa-ud3h-review.html <--- Review

Thanks to all. Will check the Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H and Gigabyte 890FXA UD pricing and availability in Kolkata.

Jaskanwar Singh said:
U cant get 880g as u will use 2 cards. The msi 890gxm g65 is micro atx. The Gigabyte 890GPA UD3H @ 8k is a very good one. Nice ocer too. Its better performer than asus that costs 9.5k.

I was not able to find Gigabyte 890GPA UD3H in SMC. However, it is in lynx-india with a price tag of 9K. Could you please provide the name where it is available @ 8k?

I googled it for price in india.

Guys, after a little bit of goggling I found out another solution, ECS A885GM-A, available at 4.2k in shopmania.in. It is a hybrid between 880G and SB850. It is having 2 PciX X16 (in X8) mode, 5 SATA3 and comes with full ATX form factor.
Is it a good buy comparing the fact that current gen motherboards are gonna phased out soon and investing high amount is not justified here.

Nice find!!But how good is shopmania.in??

ssb1551 said:
Nice find!!But how good is shopmania.in??

Actually shopmania.in does not sell something directly, rather than they provide links to the corresponding web sites. The Motherboard is available in techshop.in. The gigabyte one is also available @ 8.4K.
I tried to find review of this 885 motherboard but could not find much. Please help me on this.

tbh, I'll suggest a proper 890GX full-ATX motherboard from Gigabyte. The one which I mentioned above.

*www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/images/Products/small/A885GM-A2_135.jpg

*www.gigabyte.bz/fileupload/product/2/3516/3195.jpg

You can clearly see the difference between the quality of both the motherboards. There's a reason why that ECS motherboard is priced so low.

Found a review on the ECS motherboard here.
This review shows that the board is having good build quality, very neatly placed expansion slots (which is the main problem in my case) such that long graphics card installation wouldn't cause any installation problems and decent overclocking potential. Have a look at this review and then shares your feedback.

Finalized my choice.. Either the ECS A885GM-A (cost effective solution) @ 4.2K and MSI 890GXM-G65 @ 7k or Asrock 890GX EXTREME 3 @ 7.2K. Any last minute suggestion?

Hey cilus buddy go for what ico suggested. With the gigabyte board you can add phenom 2 x6 later and that too safely as its a 8+1 phase design and is better suited to house 125 watt processors from amd.

Or how about Asus M4A87TD-Evo ? Its a 870 chipset but is 8+1 phase design and costs 6.4k.

^^err cilus see the sorcere's post in pc guide on page 4. Look at ASUS M4A87TD EVO @ 6.4k or Gigabyte 890GPA UD3H @ 8.2k.

vicky the 890GPA UD3H is 4+1 with 8 pin EPS. In this 4+1 is nicely implemented and its a nice oc board.

Jas, I've checked the post regarding the 4+1 power connector. That's why I have also suggested Asrock 890GX-EXTREME3. It has 8+2 phase design. But another concern is budget, I'm trying to keep everything minimum as spending that much money is not justified. AM4 socket is on the horizon. Asrock 890GX-EXTREME3 is having very good rating in all the site.

Regarding ASUS M4A87TD EVO , it has one of the X16 slot running at X4 speed. How good it is to put a dedicated PhysX card on a slot running @ X4?
I am going to use a 9800GT as dedicated PhysX card.

oh i see then Asrock is the option.

But my query about putting a PhysX card on X4 mode.. How good that will be?

@ cilus
I think using a physx card in x4 mode wont hamper performance that much. Most of the rendering will be done by 6870.

And cilus i am starting to know how important this is. Yesterday i was playing mafia 2 in my system and i cranked up all settings to high at 8x af and 4x aa @ 1600x900 as my monitor is not full hd. The game worked flawlessly and there was absolutely no slow down.

But when is turned on APEX PHYSX the game slowed down to a crawl even with anti aliasing turned off. Then i realised how important physx is and ati's are incapable of running them. I still think or regret of not going with a gts 450 when i purchased my 5750.

What do think buddy?

Don't blame ATI, if you were having a GTS 450, same thing will occur to you. In your case PhysX is being processed by CPU and Nvidia for their business reason did not optimize the code for PhysX for CPu execution. Check the Tom's hardware review about PhysX.
It clearly shows that untill you are having a very powerful single GPU, minimum of GTX 470 standard, if you use your Graphics card for processing both gaming and PhysX, FPS will drop less than half that was coming initially. So don't blame yourself for not having a GTS 450.
They also tested dedicated PhysX card with ATI GPUs (with a hack for Nvidia driver) and with Nvidia GPUs.
The combination are like Nvidia(Game) + Nvidia (PhysX) and ATI (game) + Nvidia (PhysX).
The performance for their top end cards are not so different. In fact HD 5870 is deadly close to GTX480 here.
They also told PhysX is much hype than any real world thing and not to worry about it much.
I already got a 9800 GT and thats why I'm thinking of it.

I never relied on Tom's hardware as far as Nv-ATi reviews are concerned for sometime. I get a feeling he's more biased towards ATi- and sometimes like an ATi fanboy like how Charlie of Semi-Accurate does. Trying to cook an egg using a fermi card was a lol but when a reviewer is doing such antics, one might question about his way of making fun.

I am not saying reviewers are not supposed to be biased. They tend to be biased when they see a particular company listening to them/people like them and change.

Cilus said:
But my query about putting a PhysX card on X4 mode.. How good that will be?

On the x4 slot the PhysX card should be fine. You should not face a quenching of band width. Just make sure the two slots are well spaced out, cause probably both GPUs will be dual slot and if they are too close air flow is constricted.

Cilus said:
Don't blame ATI, if you were having a GTS 450, same thing will occur to you. In your case PhysX is being processed by CPU and Nvidia for their business reason did not optimize the code for PhysX for CPu execution. Check the Tom's hardware review about PhysX.
It clearly shows that untill you are having a very powerful single GPU, minimum of GTX 470 standard, if you use your Graphics card for processing both gaming and PhysX, FPS will drop less than half that was coming initially. So don't blame yourself for not having a GTS 450.
They also tested dedicated PhysX card with ATI GPUs (with a hack for Nvidia driver) and with Nvidia GPUs.
The combination are like Nvidia(Game) + Nvidia (PhysX) and ATI (game) + Nvidia (PhysX).
The performance for their top end cards are not so different. In fact HD 5870 is deadly close to GTX480 here.
They also told PhysX is much hype than any real world thing and not to worry about it much.
I already got a 9800 GT and thats why I'm thinking of it.

Yes but it would have done a better job than my current ati. Lets see if i get my friend's gts 450 and try in the same settings to see if gets the same drastic slowdown as my 5750.

Will let you know.

vickybat, a GTS450 can't do a better job. IF you use it with PhysX enabled, then probably MAFIA 2 will not give you playable frame rate. If you play MAFIA without enabling PhysX then it will perform slightly better as GTS 450 is slightly more powerful than HD 5750.

Sorcerer, regrading your Toms Hardware thought, It is your personal opinion. Toms Hardware is rated as one of the best Technical review sites. What they have suggested is based on purely technical analysis.
And leave the question of ways of making fun, it is his personal choice, but from it one cannot conclude that he is biased.
And regarding PhysX, every review site confirms that it is a nice add on but cannot be deciding factor at all. Check all the reviews in guru3d, another top most review sites. It is relying more on Business Strategies rather than performance. Check in Wikipedia about PhysX, you will get the same answer.

Cilus said:
Sorcerer, regrading your Toms Hardware thought, It is your personal opinion. Toms Hardware is rated as one of the best Technical review sites. What they have suggested is based on purely technical analysis.

I didn't say they were paid reviewers/payola site or don't review properly(well, they did use a tool for benchmarking of which the maker of that tool himself said not to consider this as a benchmark

), I said they are biased. Now if I think about it, there are times they show some slopiness in their reviews on few ocassions. Usually companies get a well-known review sites to get "support" and stick with them- exclusive access, getting stuff with NDA, getting free stuff for them to use in their test setups when using other stuff- stuff like that. Few of their benchmark analysis let me to believe that Tom's hardware didn't do a good job in uninstalling drivers and reinstalling them properly. They changed ever since TG publishing was taken over by best of media guys few years back.

ATi ditched supporting Hardware Canucks after 4770. It was also in that review those guys said that hawx's in-game benchmark is not entirely accurate.

Cilus said:
vickybat, a GTS450 can't do a better job. IF you use it with PhysX enabled, then probably MAFIA 2 will not give you playable frame rate. If you play MAFIA without enabling PhysX then it will perform slightly better as GTS 450 is slightly more powerful than HD 5750.

Ok cilus got it. But can you do 1 thing? Install mafia 2 in your system and turn apex physx and please post some result. I want to see practically how well powerful amd cards fare in a physx game.

And post more results after you add the dedicated nvidia card for physx.

Please do it if possible.

I want to see practically how well powerful amd cards fare in a physx game

You did not get it. physX cannot be processed by ATI cards. If you enable it, it will be processed by CPU and it will be crippled with the workload. That is what happened in your case. PhysX codes are not at all optimized for CPU as it uses the old X87 instruction set rather than SSE2 or SSE3 instruction set due to Nvidia's marketing policy. You cannot test a game's PhysX capability unless you use a dedicated PhysX card from nVidia.

ok now i got it. So my 5750 was not at all processing the physx code which uses the old instruction set. But the 450 would have done that and the game would not have slowed down the level it did in my case.(totally unplayble).

The 450 should have offloaded the workload from the cpu as it understands x87 instruction set right? Well upto what extent it can do it has to be practically experimented. Isnt it buddy?

vickybat said:
ok now i got it. So my 5750 was not at all processing the physx code which uses the old instruction set. But the 450 would have done that and the game would not have slowed down the level it did in my case.(totally unplayable).

The 450 should have offloaded the workload from the cpu as it understands x87 instruction set right? Well upto what extent it can do it has to be practically experimented. Isnt it buddy?

Again some misunderstanding. The load of processing PhysX along with games is quite a load, even for the high end GPUs. If you are not using a powerful GPU, minimum of GTX 470 standard @ 1080P resolution, playing a demanding game like MAFIA as well as offloading the PhysX calculation on it simply overload the GPU. The poor GTS450 will not be able to handle that much of processing and the fps will come down to 20-25 fps at max, even at 1600X1200.

That's why people use a mid-rangeGPU like GTX 460, HD 6850, HD 6870 and a dedicated PhysX card like GT 240, 9600 GT or 9800 GT. It is not a multi-gpu setup (SLI or Xfire)where both the cards are processing game. Here the dedicated PhysX card is only getting used for PhysX processing, not for any game level calculation.
I'm going to do that... Using HD 6870 solely for gaming and the 9800GT as the dedicated PhysX card.

tbh, PhysX is worthless imho (nothing wrong to have a card supporting it though

). CUDA however is a good thing to have. From what I feel, the game effects through PhysX aren't something which developers can't do without it. Only a handleful of games support it anyways.

and yes, you'll experience a frame rate decrease when you enable PhysX while playing a game on an nVidia card.

HD 5750 and GTS 450 are both equal in games, with HD 5750 cheaper by Rs.900.~ [SMC]

I think GTS 450 stands between HD 5750 and HD 5770. In reviews I've found out it to be performed little bit over HD 5750.

^^
Good for running Vantage too. But most enthusiasts shun at Vantage with PhysX on....!

Cilus said:
Again some misunderstanding. The load of processing PhysX along with games is quite a load, even for the high end GPUs. If you are not using a powerful GPU, minimum of GTX 470 standard @ 1080P resolution, playing a demanding game like MAFIA as well as offloading the PhysX calculation on it simply overload the GPU. The poor GTS450 will not be able to handle that much of processing and the fps will come down to 20-25 fps at max, even at 1600X1200.

That's why people use a mid-rangeGPU like GTX 460, HD 6850, HD 6870 and a dedicated PhysX card like GT 240, 9600 GT or 9800 GT. It is not a multi-gpu setup (SLI or Xfire)where both the cards are processing game. Here the dedicated PhysX card is only getting used for PhysX processing, not for any game level calculation.
I'm going to do that... Using HD 6870 solely for gaming and the 9800GT as the dedicated PhysX card.

Ok buddy i perfectly got it. But my 5750 gave 5-10 fps with apex physx enabled. It was totally unplayble & was slideshow. The gts 450 should have given 20-25fps( as you say) which is playable compared to 5 -10 what i got.

I meant that. But i perfectly understand what you say. When you setup your 9800gt as physx card atleast benchmark mafia 2 with apex physx on with your single 6870 and 6870+9800gt & please post your experiences on both setups so future buyers can do the same. :smile:

Don't be too sad vickybat, PhysX is little...actually highly overrated due to Nvidia's marketing campaign. In all the reviews it is mentioned that the performance in game should be deciding factor for choosing the card, not anything else. PhysX is a nice add-on, but nothing else.

The ram slots are very close to the one of the pci-e gfx card slot in both 890FXA-GD70 and 890GXM-GD65 - so they are not the best mobos layout wise.

I think layout wise these four mobos are the best under 10k :

Asrock 890GX-EXTREME3 7.2k

ECS A890GXM-A

Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H

Biostar TA890FXE around ~9k

^^ they all have elevated sata ports, enough spacing between pci-e gfx card slot and ram slots - so they perfectly fits your needs.

Thanks TopGear for your information. Going to Kolkata on 17th. Let you know then what board I'm going after.