14 DAY TRIAL // Not too long ago, ASRock was revealed to be preparing for the release of the 890GX Extreme3 motherboard, based on the upcoming 890GX chipset from Advanced Micro Devices. Of course, competing products were bound to come out in order to steal the spotlight away from the device, with a more recent addition to the list of Thuban-supporting motherboards being Gigabyte's GA-890GPA-UD3H.
While it has been known for some time that AMD is planning on launching a new chipset capable of supporting its next-generation CPUs, only recently has the supposed official launch date been reported. The ASRock 890GX Extreme3 and, now, the Gigabyte listing seem to add weight to the idea that the 890GX will debut on March 1st. Mainboards based on the chipset are expected to be highly capable, as they will not only boast an integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200-series graphics solution, but will also come with support for the SATA 6.0 Gbps interface.
The Gigabyte product has already been listed and shows a mainboard that is as fast as it is expandable. The platform supports AM3 central processing units and boasts the ATI Radeon HD 4290 DirectX 10.1 integrated graphics. This graphics component is supported by 128MB of SidePort DDR3 memory. In addition, the motherboard comes with four DDR3-1866+ memory slots and two PCI Express x16 slots that are more than ready for CrossFireX and Hybrid CrossFireX setups.
As far as storage is concerned, it is already known that the chipset's southbridge has built-in support for SATA 6.0Gbps. Gigabyte's card has no less than six such ports, which means that end-users will be able to install plenty of high-speed HDDs or SSDs. The hardware maker also took care to add two SATA 3.0 Gbps ports. As for I/O and Internet connectivity, the motherboard features 7.1 channel audio, FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet, as well as D-Sub, DVI and HDMI video outputs.
As an added bonus, the motherboard's manufacturer implemented a DualBIOS feature and a pair of USB 3.0 connectors. The product is available on Newegg and bears a price tag of $140.