CeBIT: fill up on AMD chipsets

Since the ATI buyout, AMD has decided to take back control of its platform by supplying a full range of chipsets, which has had the effect of removing NVIDIA from this market. The few AMD platform NVIDIA chipset motherboards on show at CeBIT were, as a general rule, part of an old range of products.

There were many motherboards based on series 8 chipsets at the show. To recap, this new family of chipsets will be be made up of 4 varieties, at least at first. Two of them, the 880G and 890GX have a DirectX 10.1 graphics controller. In fact they use the same northbrige as currently on the 785G, the RS880, but clocked respectively at 560 (Radeon HD 4250) and 700 MHz (Radeon HD 4290) in place of 500 MHz (Radeon HD 4200). Some motherboard manufacturers, such as ECS, have however already clocked the 785G IGP at 700 MHz.

These chipsets will be accompanied by the 870 and 890FX (RD890) that differ in the number of PCI Express lanes each has. The first will offer a PCI Express port at 1 x 16x or 2 x 8x and the second 2 PCI Express ports at 1 x 16x or 4 x 8x.

In comparison to the current offer, the innovations are mostly in terms of the southbridge. The SB850 brings SATA 3 6Gbps support, 2 additional PCI Express 2.0 lanes and an integrated network controller, which wasn’t the case previously. AMD has simply connected a USB 3.0 controller to the southbridge, in contrast to what happens on Intel chipsets.

The RS880.

The RD890.

The SB850.

Some examples of motherboards, you’ll note that they all support the USB via the additional Nec controller:

Asus Crosshair IV Extreme: AMD 890FX ultra high end.

Asus M4A87TD EVO: AMD 870.

Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H: AMD 890GX

MSI 880GMA-E45: AMD 880G