Conclusion:

The design and performance were quite acceptable and the overclocking ability was OK for a micro-ATX board. This mobo has a robust featureset and the ability to run CrossFireX. With Its small size it's perfect for a HTPC case. There's also the ability to unlock extra cores in the BIOS and OC Genie Lite takes care of automatically overclocking the system.

Overclocking:

The Athlon X2 260 was OCed @3700 , while the Athlon X4 640 reached 3.4 GHz.

Benchmarks:

Valve, Euler3D, Windows Media Encoder 64 bit, Power Consumption, 3D Mark Vantage, Cinebench, Sisoft Sandra. In the gaming benches an ATI Radeon HD4870 512MB was used.

Compared to:

Phenom II X4 955, Athlon II X4 640, Phenom II X2 555, Athlon II X4 260, Intel E8500 tested with an Asus Maximus Extreme (X38) and G-Skill DDR-2 1066MHz memory.

Test Setup:

• HDD: WD 1 TB Caviar Black
• Power supply: ThermalTake 1000 Watt
• Optical: Lite-On DVD RW
• OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64
• RAM: 4GB DDR-3 1600MHz OCZ Platinum

Lots of motherboards were compared in the benchmarks: ASRock M3A790GXH128, ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3, Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H, GA-790FXTA-UD5 & MA 790FXT-UD5P, MSI 785GM-E65, 790GX-G65, ECS A795GM-AD3 and A890GXM-A Black Edition.

Conclusion: This board supports USB3 and SATA3, overclockers will like the Active Phase Switching. The contents of the package are a bit meagre with only on SATA cable. The performance is good and there are lots of OC options, a solid package with a good price/performance ratio.

Overclocking: With the OC Switch an AMD Phenom II X4 810(2.6GHz stock) was overclocked @ 3.12GHz running stable. Manually the reviewer reached 3300MHz, a gain of 700MHz. The memory used was 2x1GB DDR3 Kington PC12800 and the air cooler was a Thermaltake.

Benchmarks: Sisoft Sandra, x264, SYSmark 2007, 3D and PC Mark Vantage, Specview, wPrime, CPUBench, PCmark05. For the gaming benchmarks an ATI RADEON HD 4870 1GB was used.

Compared to: the Intel DH55TC.

Conclusion: After the first boot everything worked perfectly stable. The test sessions with this board went smoothly and the editor had no reason to complain about anything. This is a solid product and certainly worth to consider when going for an AMD-based HTPC. The reviewer gave it no award because: Quote"to hand out awards a product does really have to stand out against the competition...having tested 0 other 890GX motherboards, it's difficult to say where the 890GXM-G65 stands.

Overclocking: An AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE (3.2GHz stock speed) was overclocked @ 3800MHz, 19x200. The memory that was used was 8GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600MHz and the air-cooler a CoolerMaster V8. The GPU was OCed @ 952MHZ, an increase of 36%.

Benchmarks: Cinebench 10, PCMark 2005, Hexus Pifast, Lavalys Everest, Winrar,Resident Evil 5, SuperPi 1M and 32M, TechArp X264, Wprime 32M and 1024M.

Compared to: ASUS M4A785T-M and ASUS P7H55-M Pro.

Conclusion: A micro-ATX board that enables you to make a Crossfire system with USB3 and SATA3. Performance and stability were good, it was faster than the 785G board in almost every test and it has a BIOS packed with features. With VGA, HDMI, DVI and optical Audio out connectors this mobe could be the basis for a Home Theatre PC, it has no DisplayPort though. Besides that overclocking results were reasonable but not extreme. Power Consumption full load 185.6 watts, Idle 60.7 watts.

Overclocking: A Phenom II X4 965 was overclocked @3960.0MHz with a 240MHz BCLK HT bus 2300MHz. Base Clock overcllocking resulted in a max. FSB speed of 262MHz. Memory used: 2x2GB Corsair DDR3 1333 MHz, 7-7-7-20.

Benchmarks: Sandra, x264, Cinebench R11.5, TrueCrypyt 6.3a, WinRAR 3.91 x64, Blu Ray performance, SATA Performance, Crysis, Far Cry 2, Half Life 2 E2, Unreal Tournament 3, 3D Mark Vantage, USB3 Performance, NTTTCP Ethernet Performance.