Motherboards are hardly the Venus De Milo of PC hardware, but this pair are easy on the eye.Īsus' Sabertooth board comes without that TUF thermal armour that gives its P67 iteration that distinctive look, and sports the rugged design and heatsinks painted in ubiquitous military tones. That's an enticing prospect: SLI, SATA 6 GBps and USB 3.0 now, and one simple upgrade to a Zambezi CPU later. It's good to go with Bulldozer chips when they arrive too, but they're also happy with any existing AM3 processors. In fact, the Southbridge is the same SB950 from the previous AMD chipset, save for opimitisations in USB 3.0 and PCI-e data paths.ĪMD is great at backwards compatibility and this chipset carries that consumer-friendly torch. It seemed like a good opportunity to get the jump on Intel as it works to get USB 3.0 to co-exist with Thunderbolt. Both boards have just four USB 3.0 ports, and 14 USB 2.0 ports. It's still handled by an onboard controller limiting the number of ports. Sadly, there's no native USB 3.0 support as many were hoping. Asus isn't really leaving anyone wanting by including just six SATA 3 and two SATA 2 ports, but it's worth bearing in mind when figuring out why the Gigabyte board is pricier. The 990FX retains SATA 6 Gbps support from 8 series boards, and Gigabyte has made full use of this by including eight SATA 3 ports. This is quite a big selling point for loyal AMD gamers – these are the first mobos to support Nvidia's multi-GPU tech, and the very fact it's included suggests Bulldozer has the grunt to match SLI'd GPUs. Gigabyte's board will actually support 4-way SLI or CrossFireX setups, and the Sabertooth can hack three-way support. Hyperthreading gives a performance boost of around 25 per cent out of one core, and AMD is promising 80 per cent performance boosts from the second integer core on a single module.Īll that processing magic will appear on store shelves in Zambezi quad-mod chips before you'll be digging your winter coat out, but for existing AMD CPU customers, the Bulldozer-ready Asus Sabertooth 990FX and Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 still have features to offer right now.įirst, there's a landmark moment for AMD boards and multi-GPU. Intel's chip is a four core, eight-threaded affair, while the Bulldozer chip will have – ostensibly – eight actual cores. Those eight core, quad-mod Bulldozer chips should match the i7 2600K pace for pace. With this architecture, there can be no single-core operation, as the two cores in each module share fetch and decode architecture, as well as that L2/3 cache. We're taking the opportunity to coin the phrase quad-mod… So a quad-core Bulldozer CPU would comprise of two Bulldozer modules, and the eight-core CPUs will be built from four Bulldozer modules. Beyond that, there's shared L2 and 元 cache for both integer cores in the Bulldozer module.
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