As a general rule, articles devoted to motherboards and chipsets closely accompanied the release of new processors. However, AMD book us today chipset, the 990FX, but no new chip to be launched on the market. We have good news and bad news.The good news is that this new chipset remains fully compatible with the existing processors for socket AM3, as well as to support future processors for socket AM3 +, which will be based on Bulldozer architecture.the bad news is that, precisely, the Bulldozer processors are not yet ready. The chips on the B0 stepping are currently in the hands of manufacturers of motherboards, but they have already told us that performance was well below expectations and that they should achieve the next stepping that situation suits them.
Technically, you could buy a motherboard based on 990FX today and to insert a current Phenom II, but if you bavez on a Zambezi to six cores, it is really better wait a few months yet. Unless there is another reason to adopt today the new chipset?
The 990FX: identical to the 890FX, but with guaranteed compatibility
In terms of chip, the 990FX chipset is absolutely identical to the 890FX. Surprised? AMD said have been intended to indicate clearly what platforms were compatible with the future Bulldozer processors. If you see a motherboard chipset 990FX based in commerce, so you can be sure that it will be able to allow a processor + AM3 (current AM3 processors and more, of course).
In order to benefit from the capabilities of management of energy and the frequency of the Zambezi, should absolutely be a socket AM3 + (also called AM3b), 942-PIN.
Conversely, the CPUs AM3 + can also be mounted on the AM3 motherboards, but need a BIOS update. Since the arrival (or not) will depend this update on the motherboard manufacturer, is easy to understand why AMD opted to put things clear right now.Note also that, even after to update the BIOS, the AM3 sockets will not benefit from the above features and that, if the 890FX and the 990FX both supports HyperTransport 3.0 and allow therefore with 5.2 GT/s maximum transfer rate, MSI has told us that the 990FX added support for HyperTransport 3.1, which allows to 6.4 GT/s (which, apparently, should be useful for the Zambezi to eight cores).We are not fans of the waltz of the labels, but in this case, it is actually an evil necessary. After all, it is always better to require the consumer to change socket whenever it changes of processor architecture (* hum hum * Intel). Most of the owners of motherboard socket AM3 + want more probably insert a Zambezi processor, but it's all same pleasure to see that AMD cares compatibility (and backwards compatibility) of its different generations of hardware.
The SLI, a pleasant surprise
The big news of the day however has nothing to do with socket AM3 + but with the support of the SLI. Quite frankly, nothing prevents the manufacturers of motherboards offer the SLI on their 890FX chipset based products, but it seems that none of them has the intention to do so. In practice, the SLI will be thus differentiating element to encourage players to change motherboard when they adopt the FX (Zambezi) series processor.As Intel with the Z68 Express chipset, AMD is therefore now supports ILS and the CrossFire. Better yet, the 990FX has 42 lines PCI Express, which allows each location configurations with two cards to benefit from its own link x 16 (to compare with the two bonds x 8 Intel). Do you pack however not too much about this "advantage": even with eight lines, Intel components are perfectly able to compete with AMD hardware, as evidenced by our three-part article devoted to the performance of the feature (in English) configurations.However, the 990FX has an advantage: it has so many PCI Express components of second generation that there no need to appeal to a NF200 chip to allow three graphics configurations: two motherboards we received test allow configurations of this type (x 16 / x 8 / x 8) without any problem, and configurations to four GPU cards like the GeForce GTX 590 or the Radeon HD 6990.
However, without processor AM3 + test, the output of the 990FX has for the moment only a single genuine interest: the SLI support.
For this reason, we are going to compare the performance of a Phenom II X 4 980 to an Intel Core i5-2400 when on the couple to a pair of GeForce GTX 570 graphics cards. Difficult to imagine a more fair game: the P8Z68-V Pro motherboard is available at the same price that Asus plans to ask for the 990FX Sabertooth and Core i5-2400 costs just five euros more than the AMD Phenom II X 4 980. All other components are identical, we are therefore right to a face to face all that there is more impartial.The return of the SLI platform AMD justifies a change of motherboard? This is what we'll see!
0 Comments:
Post a Comment