ASUS boards never fail to surprise us. When I first got hold of the board, I was wondering why are there still switches on board. It seems old school to have switches or jumpers on board. I later noticed that it is one of the key feature "Core Unlocker". As AMD is aware of the trick, new boards using the new south bridge SB850 will no longer be able to unlock the hidden cores anymore. In fact, ACC function seems to have disappeared altogether from the SB850. With ASUS "Core unlocker" you can uncover the hidden cores by just turning on the switch on board.

For those who hate to trial and error for the best overclock, ASUS has Turbo EVO is present on this board which gives you the ultimate OC in terms of stability and performance on the processor used using the option CPU Level UP! Other features include MemOK! which detects memory issues and clocks down the ram to make the system boot.

While these are neat features, ASUS did not include Power ON/OFF, reset or clear cmos switches on board. You will probably need to short circuit the pins to reset or power off during testing. The board also features Express Gate allowing you to access the net for IM, browsing without entering the OS.

In terms of expansion capabilities, this board has 6 SATA 6Gbps ports which supports RAID 0,1,5,10. The additional PATA is a plus for those using older DVDROM or IDE HDDs. While the ECS model we reviewed has 3 full length slots, the ASUS only has 2 for CrossFireX. It would definitely be better to have more full length PCIe slots to fit more peripherals.

In terms of performance, the ASUS board performs very well especially with an overclocked GPU and Sideport memory. Performance is further enhanced with hidden cores uncovered. In addition to overclocking the board using the BIOS, you can also use the software provided to overclock the CPU. In our test, we managed to overclock our Phenom II X3 710 to 3.6GHz (see picture below). In a separate test of Auto Tuning, the system gave us a boost to only 200MHz which makes me wonder how useful the tool is. Overclocking BIOS options can be seen here.

In conclusion, the ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 is a nice board to have if you intend to unleash the power of the hidden cores. There is room for improvement.

Discuss

Pros

• USB 3 support
• Core Unlocker
• TurboEVO

Cons

• NO Power ON/OFF/Reset Switches, Clear CMOS switch at backplane
• No DisplayPort

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.