AMD's 890GX Chipset - Same Graphics, Better South Bridge
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 2, 2010 4:36 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Testing the SB850’s SATA Controller
Update: New 3Gbps and 6Gbps results on the AMD 890GX here.
In my review of OCZ’s Vertex Limited Edition SSD I previewed some of the results of the world’s first SSD with native SATA 6Gbps support - Crucial’s RealSSD C300. Capable of sequential read speeds greater than 333MB/s, the C300 is the only drive in the world that can actually benefit from 6Gbps SATA at this point.
There’s just one problem. My RealSSD C300 died in the process of testing it with the 890GX. I don’t believe it was the motherboard or chipset, but right now it looks like I stumbled upon an untested usage case that put the drive in a state where it won’t even let a system POST anymore.
It’s because of situations like this that I’ve been very cautious in recommending any new SSDs. Hence my conclusion in the Vertex LE review:
“Go up another $100 and the recommendation is easily the Crucial RealSSD C300. Again, assuming that nothing horrible ever happens with the drive. I do have more faith in Crucial’s validation testing given that Micron is shipping the same drive to OEMs, but it’s still a brand new, unproven platform.”
With the bricked C300, I can’t provide any 6Gbps results on the 890GX unfortunately. I should have a new drive in about 12 hours so I’ll update here once I do get it. With the C300 out of my parts bin, I switched to a drive that could really push the limits of 3Gbps SATA - the OCZ Vertex LE.
Unfortunately, in doing so I uncovered another problem - this time with the 890GX. It’s AHCI performance is noticeably lower than Intel’s:
| Iometer 6-22-2008 Performance | 2MB Sequential Read | 2MB Sequential Write | 4KB Random Read | 4KB Random Write (4K Aligned) |
| AMD 890GX | 248 MB/s | 217.5 MB/s | 38.4 MB/s | 130.1 MB/s |
| AMD 790GX | 247.8 MB/s | 213 MB/s | 37.6 MB/s | 119.5 MB/s |
| Intel H55 | 264.9 MB/s | 247.7 MB/s | 48.6 MB/s | 180 MB/s |
AMD’s south bridge ends up delivering anywhere from 72 - 93% of the performance of Intel’s ICH. While this isn’t something that you’d necessarily see with hard drives, it is something that is evident with SSDs since they do actually push the limits of 3Gbps SATA. To make sure it wasn’t an iometer thing I also copied a 2.4GB x264 over from the boot drive (Intel X25-M G2 160GB) and still noted slower performance on AMD’s chipset. This is actually an improvement over the SB750 used in the 790GX/FX. Performance was even worse back then, particularly with writes.
And in case you’re wondering, running the SSD in Native IDE mode didn’t help either - performance was expectedly slower.
ASUS’ engineers apparently ran across something similar. They found that disabling C1E and Cool’n’Quiet boosted drive performance and recommended I try it. The results were unexpectedly higher, but not on par with Intel’s ICH performance:
| Iometer 6-22-2008 Performance | 2MB Sequential Read | 2MB Sequential Write | 4KB Random Read | 4KB Random Write (4K Aligned) |
| AMD 890GX | 248 MB/s | 217.5 MB/s | 38.4 MB/s | 130.1 MB/s |
| AMD 890GX (C1E/CnQ Disabled) | 256.4 MB/s | 234.8 MB/s | 42.3 MB/s | 135.3 MB/s |
| Intel H55 | 264.9 MB/s | 247.7 MB/s | 48.6 MB/s | 180 MB/s |
Obviously disabling important power management features isn’t a long term solution, but it does show that AMD may be able to provide a future hardware or BIOS fix for the problem.
Slower SSDs didn’t exhibit the problem. I tried the Indilinx Barefoot based Mushkin Io:
| Iometer 6-22-2008 Performance | 2MB Sequential Read | 2MB Sequential Write | 4KB Random Read | 4KB Random Write (4K Aligned) |
| AMD 890GX | 229.6 MB/s | 166.5 MB/s | 35.7 MB/s | 13.4 MB/s |
| AMD 790GX | 229.7 MB/s | 166.5 MB/s | 35.7 MB/s | 13.4 MB/s |
| Intel H55 | 236.9 MB/s | 164.4 MB/s | 36.0 MB/s | 13.4 MB/s |
It appears that the dropoff only happens in one of two cases: 1) When you’re pushing a lot of IOPS (e.g. 4KB random write tests on the OCZ Vertex LE) or 2) When you’re pushing a lot of bandwidth (e.g. 2MB sequential read tests on the OCZ Vertex LE).
As a mainstream chipset, the SATA issues don’t really matter. Unfortunately, if you are going to buy a high performance SSD then it may be an issue.
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semo - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
I'm not aware if the motherboard header pin configurations for USB 3.0 have been standardized yet. I'm sure there will be a period when every maker will come up with their own design until we settle on a single oneglockjs - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
i don't feel so bad in being impatient and buying one of the gigabyte 333's...790xta to be exact. looks like i didnt miss much :Dsemilobster - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Great review Anand! When can we expect a review of the new Hybrid-Crossfire with the 5450? How did they make this work? So far Hybrid-Crossfire has only worked with other RV610 based GPUs (the RV620 was just a slightly modified RV610)Spoelie - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Extremely disappointed. Still the uncompetitive SATA performance, no USB3, no ACC and the same integrated graphics performance we had back in 2007, 2 and a half years ago.For a company that's behind on cpu performance and tries (tried?) to push the platform "advantage", this is one lackluster platform. It's like they've given up altogether.
I've had AMD systems for the past years, but 2010 seems to be time to switch, and it pains me :(
Alouette Radeon - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
Let me see if I understand this correctly. You're going to switch to the criminal organization known as Intel because AMD hasn't upgraded their SATA? You're kidding right? No spinning hard drive today can keep up with the SATA speeds as they are except for SSDs and you're whining about that? Don't even get me started on the fact that the Radeon HD 4290 is still the top performing IGP with DX10.1 added. Do you really think you'd prefer an Intel GMA??? My god, what rock do you live under? Just for ideological purposes alone, I won't touch Intel or nVidia until they clean themselves up. Dishonesty in a corporation pisses me off more than anything and if you've seen the way Intel has conducted itself in the last 10 years you wouldn't be so quick to switch. Sure, switch to Intel, increase their market share, let AMD die and then we'll all be happy with Intel having a monopoly and dictating to us what we get as they slow technological advancement down and raise prices on everything all because you felt inadequate without SATA performance numbers that are meaningless because there's no hard drives that can take advantage of them! With knuckleheads like you in the world, it's no wonder we're where we are today!AznBoi36 - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
I don't really see a problem with AMD's platform. Sure their SATA performance isn't as great as Intels; but like Anand said - as long as you aren't running the latest SSDs then the SATA performance difference between AMD/Intel is negligible.And yeah, these guys are sitting on their asses as far as chipsets go. How long has ICH/r10 been out? A long time now. I'm still waiting for 8 SATA ports with RAID6. That's probably a long time coming though.
If you want ACC, then you can still pick up an older 790/785 board. Even my old Gigabyte MA785GM-US2H has it. The only benefit I see with the new 890GX is if you need native SATA3 RAID and more than 2 ports (all other boards use the marvel controller and have only 2 SATA3 ports with RAID 0/1/0+1)
Mr Perfect - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link
The problem is that native SATA 6gbps for SSDs is exactly why I was interested in the 8 series. It's back to 3rd party controllers now, which gives AMD no advantage.leexgx - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link
but it does support ACC and core unlocker they had an page Just for it (did any one read all of this pre-review before posting)all that amd have done is hid the option now but it still can be done
Griswold - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Oh yea switch to where the grass has the same color because there are no more significant upgrades between platforms either...They have now all been equally lazy. And lets not talk about nvidia with their endless nfarce rebadging of chipsets from a decade gone by...
Its clear that there is no pressure in the platform business anymore. Nvidia is a joke and AMD / Intel just throw old bones at us. Get used to it. Also because "platform" is becoming more and more meaningless, except for southbridges...
Spoelie - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
I'm not saying Intel has a better platform feature wise, but it has more performance (SATA, CPU) and lower power consumption. AMD used to have a platform advantage, but the last year that was erased. There is absolutely no reason anymore, except for price, to pick AMD at this moment. And you do not want to be in that position in this industry.