Official ASUS AMD 900 Series Overview

For those of you who have been anxiously awaiting the new AMD 900 series chipsets and motherboards, this post will give you an idea of some of the performance numbers as well as list some of the features of ASUS’ new 900 series AMD motherboards. As well as features and functionality of the chipset, I’ll also go over the ASUS specific additions on our new AMD 900 series motherboards. These chipsets and motherboards are optimized for current generation CPUs, e.g. hexa-core Thubans, as well as AMD’s upcoming Zambezi “Bulldozer” octa-core CPUs. The socket will be AM3+ but will be backwards compatible with socket AM3 CPUs.

The 900 series chipset is the replacement to AMD’s 800 series so our new boards will be replacing boards like the Crosshair IV Formula, Crosshair IV Extreme, and M4A89GTD PRO to name a few. Three of our main 900 series boards are the M5A99X EVO, Sabertooth 990FX, and Crosshair V Formula. Both the Sabertooth 990FX and the Crosshair V Formula will be available at launch and the M5A99X EVO and Thunderbolt version of Crosshair V Formula will be available later.

Some of the advantages of 900 series over the 800 series as well as some ASUS specific features on our new AMD 900 series boards are USB 3.0 on the new and speedy ASMedia USB3 controller, SLI, UEFI BIOS, our DIGI+ VRM, native SATA 6G with RAID support, AI Suite II with EPU and TPU switches, Auto Tuning, optimized layout with dual slot spacing of PCI-e slots, advanced fan controls with all have at least two 4-pin fan headers that allow for fan control

These new boards are the first AMD board to have UEFI BIOS and fully support 2.2+ TB hard drives and they are the first AMD boards to feature our DIGI+ VRM for enhanced stability and overclockability. Also, these will be the first AMD chipset boards to support SLI.

The Sabertooth 990FX and the Crosshair V Formula both support 3-way SLI. The Crosshair V Formula also supports 4-way SLI using ASUS’ ROG Xpander.
To give you an idea of the performance on our 990FX boards, here are some results of various benchmarks comparisons between the Sabertooth 990FX and our 890FX ROG board, Crosshair IV Formula. The tests on both motherboards were done using an X6 1055T Thuban, 4GB of 1600MHz CAS 9 memory, and an ASUS GTX570. These tests were done with no overclocking.



The following hard drive performance tests were done using SATA III SSDs connected to SATA III ports.

Sabertooth 990FX HD Performance with C300 128GB


Crosshair IV Formula HD Performance with C300 128GB


Sabertooth 990FX HD Performance with Vertex 3


MaxxMem^2 1.95 Single – Sabertooth 990FX


MaxxMem^2 1.95 Multiple – Sabertooth 990FX1.8


MaxxMem^2 1.95 Single – Crosshair IV Formula


MaxxMem^2 1.95 Multiple – Crosshair IV Formula


USB3 Performance Vertex3 ASMedia Adapter – Sabertooth 990FX


If you would like detailed information on these boards, features, and performance, check out these next 4 videos containing unboxings, overviews, Q&A, etc. The first video features a Q&A session regarding our new AMD 900 series motherboards.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh76eBqHaKY&feature=related

The video below features an unboxing of our Sabertooth 990FX.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JsTKlOvABM&feature=related

The next video contains an overview of the Sabertooth 990FX.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cubX8HndS0&feature=related

And lastly, check out the Crosshair V Formula unboxing below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3FmXDbUxBo&feature=related

So, as a summary (this is just me skimming things):

The differences in performance are so small that it can just be attributed to statistical error. The 990FX chipset is almost the exact same as the 890FX. It just gets HT 3.1, AM3+ socket, UEFI, and official SLI support. Anything else is motherboard specific, and not related to the chipset itself.

Tsumi said:

So, as a summary (this is just me skimming things):

The differences in performance are so small that it can just be attributed to statistical error. The 990FX chipset is almost the exact same as the 890FX. It just gets HT 3.1, AM3+ socket, UEFI, and official SLI support. Anything else is motherboard specific, and not related to the chipset itself.

Click to expand...

Sounds about right.

Tsumi said:

So, as a summary (this is just me skimming things):

The differences in performance are so small that it can just be attributed to statistical error. The 990FX chipset is almost the exact same as the 890FX. It just gets HT 3.1, AM3+ socket, UEFI, and official SLI support. Anything else is motherboard specific, and not related to the chipset itself.

Click to expand...

which is really the case nowadays for all mobos using the same chipset. You're buying the board for features, overclockability, bios updates, and stability. Material non-overlocked performance comparisons between any AMD or Intel mobo are pretty much non existent.

OC_Seer, do both these boards support IOMMU?