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Biostar's TA890GXE motherboard is a no-frills approach to the AMD 890GX chipset. It's a microATX form-factor motherboard so it can fit into nearly any case, it has robust graphics and storage options and most importantly it's affordable.
80% Rating: 
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Biostar TA890GXE |
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Overclocking CPU/IGP, Power Draw, Test Specs
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| Overclocking Results: |
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Before the
overclocking tests can begin PCSTATS first prepares the field by dropping the
CPU multiplier from 16x to 8x, and disabling clock speed throttling features
like Cool'n'quiet, CPU C1E power states, etc.
A set of
DDR3-1600MHz modules from Corsair were installed into the Biostar TA890GXE
motherboard and the memory set to run at DDR3-800 mode - this is done so the RAM
won't hold the CPU back.
Now to find out how far the Biostar TA890GXE motherboard will overclock!
The bus speed was rapidly
bumped up from 200MHz to 235MHz, then 245... 255... and 260MHz which caused the
PC to fail to POST. After a hard reboot, we dialed things back to 250MHz and
sure enough Windows 7 booted up just fine. A maximum overclock of 250MHz on the AMD 890GX chipset is okay, but far
from the best overclock PCSTATS achieved on the 890GX platform - 285MHz.
Radeon HD 4290 Overclocking
After
finishing with the CPU, PCSTATS turned its attention to overclocking the Radeon
HD 4290 IGP. The ability to overclock an integrated video chipset is fun way to
grab a few extra frames per second, but if you're finding the IGP graphics too
slow you really need to install a discrete graphics card.
BIOS
options allow you to overclock the Radeon HD 4290 GPU from its default clock
speed of 700MHz to at least 1000MHz on the Biostar TA890GXE motherboard. After
each speed bump the stability of the IGP was tested with a round of 3DMark06. To
make a long story short, PCSTATS had no problem overclocking the Biostar
TA890GXE's HD 4290 IGP to 975MHz.
Next up, power draw measurements and PCSTATS test system
specs... then it's on to benchmarks!
Measuring Energy
Efficiency
Energy efficient computers are a good thing, so it helps
to know how power efficient, or power hungry different parts of a computer are
when stressed with different tasks. Since it is very difficult to isolate a
videocard or CPU and measure power draw separately, PCSTATS measures total
system power draw with the aid of an Extech 380803 AC Power Analyzer and A-PFC
compliant PC Power and Cooling 750W power supply. The meter is
placed between the 120V AC outlet and the PC power supply. By stressing the test
platform's graphics solution or processor, it's then possible to measure power
draw relative to the PC at an idle state.
The test system is measured at Idle (Windows desktop),
Graphics Loaded (3Dmark06) and CPU Loaded (Prime 95) states.
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Total System Power Draw
 Biostar TA890GXE |
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Graphics
Solution |
Idle
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Graphics
Loaded |
CPU
Loaded |
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AMD HD
4290
(Integrated Graphics) |
60w |
115w |
144w
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nVidia Geforce GTS250
(Discrete Graphics)
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115w
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246w
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206w
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(At desktop) |
(via 3Dmark 06) |
(via
Prime95) | |
Even though the AMD 890GX chipset bumps the speed of the
graphics core to 700Mhz, the system draws relatively little power under load on
IGP alone. Idle power draw is just 60 Watts on IGP graphics!
HD Tach is a physical performance hard drive test for
Windows. In Windows 9X/ME it uses a special kernel mode VXD to get maximum
accuracy by bypassing the file system. A similar mechanism is used in Windows
NT/2000/XP. HD Tach reads from areas all over the hard drive and reports an
average speed. It also logs the read speeds to a text file that you can load
into a spreadsheet and graph to visually read the results of the test.
| HD Tach 3.0.4.0 |
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Burst |
Random Access |
Average Read |
AMD 890GX / SB850
SATA 6Gb/s
(Biostar TA890GXE) |
214.9 MB/s |
17
ms |
115.1 MB/s |
AMD 890GX / SB850 SATA 6Gb/s
( ASUS M4A89GTD-Pro/USB3 ) |
333.9 MB/s |
17 ms |
114.4 MB/s |
Intel P55 / Marvell SE9128 SATA
6Gb/s
(Gigabyte P55A-UD6) |
291.5 MB/s |
17 ms |
115.5
MB/s | |
The native AMD SB850 implementation seems to be a touch
faster in the Burst test than the Marvell-to-Intel P55 Express implementation
used on the Gigabyte P55A-UD6 motherboard.
Prelude to Benchmarks
The details of how the Biostar TA890GXE
motherboard test system was configured for benchmarking; the specific hardware,
software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions is indicated below. In
the second column are the general specs for the reference platforms this AMD
890GX based motherboard is to be compared against.
Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test
system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results on
the next page.
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| PCSTATS Test System Configurations |
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HD Tach V3.0.4.0 
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