Asus M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. The Asus M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 Motherboard3. Testing Methodology, BIOS and Overclocking4. PCMark Vantage5. 3DMark Vantage and 116. SiSoft Sandra 20117. Cinebench R10 and R11.58. Super Pi Mod 1.59. KitGuru Photoshop Bench V1 (4)10. Media Encoding: Cyberlink MediaEspresso11. Grand Theft Auto 4: EFLC12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

We decided to use the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition processor for testing as it is perfectly matched to this high-end AMD board.  We combined this with a Noctua C12P heatsink which provides more than ample cooling performance for this processor.

Test System

Motherboard: Asus M4A89GTD Pro/USB3
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition
Memory: Crucial Ballistix 4GB (2x 2GB) DDR3
PSU: Corsair TX650W
Chassis: Corsair Graphite 600T
Graphics Card: Zotac GeForce GTX 470
Cooler: Noctua C12P
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Hard Drive: Corsair Force F40 40GB SSD

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
PCMark Vantage
Super Pi Mod 1.5
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 7
FRAPS Professional
SiSoftware Sandra 2011
Cinebench R10
Cinebench R11.5
KitGuru Photoshop Benchmark 1(4)
Grand Theft Auto 4: EFLC

All the latest BIOS updates and WHQL drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru test all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.

For our tests, we decided to overclock the system using the ‘Auto OC' functionality of Asus' TurboV software.  This achieved a reasonable overclock of 16%, taking the system from 3.20GHz to 3.80GHz by upping the base clock from 200MHz to 232Mhz, and leaving the multiplier at 16x.

The BIOS included with the motherboard is a standard affair, containing all the options we could possibly ask for.  We have included the full set of BIOS screenshots below.

Become a Patron!