OK - first things first: I looked into that audio thing, mainly out of curiosity, as I hadn't yet heard of the ALC892, which turns out to be because RealTek hasn't released specs, yet! Appears that the ALC892 supports the streaming of the new lossless multichanel codecs like Dolby True HD and DTS HD - which hardly any receivers/decoders support yet, so may be moot for the time being... RealTek
general comparisons; RealTek
889 specs. (also - thanks! While 'visiting', I discovered I hadn't got the latest 'driver of the week', audio
and LAN[:jaydeejohn:4])
The Gb 890GX seems to have nice over-clocking, cross-firing capabilities which I want to experiment with and the price-point is very attractive. Are the hot-rodding abilities of the Gb890 FX that much better to justify the $100 price diff over the GX in the case of UD7 or even $50 extra for the UD5
...best way I know to
compare!
My basic opinion on the overall comparison is that I would
never buy a board
with 'on-board' graphics, unless I intended to
use the graphics! Here's why: I'm not sure whther AMD does this pretty much the same, but I know for a fact that what Intel's done with the 'Clarksdale' i3/i5 chips is use a dual-die setup: they've taken the memory controller off the 32nm core die, and moved it to the 40nm AGP die - they did this to greatly speed up the graphics processing abilities, but it comes at the cost of slowing down the core and cache's ability to crank that memory bus! GB even cites this (though not with any explanation) in their marketing info for the 'graphics-capable' 1156 MOBOs: "supports XXXX DDR3 speed
* (the ever-important '*'!!) * speed is limited to YYYY when using on-board graphics" Look at the BIOS config - there is an IGX sub-page entry to determine how much main DDR3 is used by the graphics subsystem, and I'm gonna bet that, even with this access turned completely off, it's gonna 'cost' you something, in either speed capability, or stability: TANSTAAFL!*
* - 'there ain't no such thing as a free lunch! (Robert Heinlein -
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - '66)
I did notice that the FX boards have 8+2 phase power management. I expect this is where the GX is limited in it's abilities to o-clock and c-fire. Yes, no?
Umm, GB says "for 140W TDP processors - I didn't know AMD
made 140W TDPs (except the older 9950BE and 9850 BE Phenoms) - even the new Phenom II X6 Black 1090T 3.2GHz is
only a 125W CPU?!? More oomph never hurts when OCing, I guess - I just never recommend pushing hardware 'to the wall'; I tend to advise sticking with reasonable, 'easy-on-the-hardware' OCs...
Assuming I go with the Gb 890GX board, are either of these sets compatible?
Well, it, once again, depends on your definition of 'compatible'... Will either one work - I think yes. They may not get that low a latency on an 89x chipset board, and you will have to 'hand tweak', as they're both XMP (Intel-compatible) DIMMs (BTW - as always expected, the faster one is the bigger
$$ set!) G.Skill doesn't seem to directly recommend RAM for these boards yet (haven't looked on the forum, just the configurator), but they recommend
this for 79x chipsetted boards, so I'm sure it will work with the 89x... Again, the fast stuff will need to be tuned manually, and may be a tad short of spec'd speed (have not enough experience yet to know for sure) but will likely work OK...