ASUS makes some great boards, but to the R&D team it is still not enough. This is what you get when you talk about ASUS' R&D team. Well, imagine a room full of the same people. There is always one more tweak, hack, or adjustment to be done to get that few extra MHz out of their systems. The margins are incredibly tight.Have you ever known someone that just has to tinker with things? You know the guy I am talking about. Likewise, sub-300MB/s in HDTach and a maximum bus overclock of 300MHz relegate this board to a mid-table position overall. It's also a couple frames slower than the best in World in Conflict. It's joint fastest in video encoding, but a second off the pace in Cinebench. Strictly speaking, the M4A88TD-V Evo delivers slightly patchy results in our application tests.

The core unlocker ensures you can make the most of AMD CPUs with hidden cores, while the Express Gate embedded Linux OS divvies up a quick booting option for fast access to the internet and media files.Īll of which just leaves space for the minor matter of performance. Still, Asus' comprehensive set of BIOS features and options goes a long way towards making up for that. Bumping up a Phenom II from 3.2GHz to 3.45GHz is hardly worth the bother. In practice it doesn't deliver terribly impressive results. However, what you do get is the TurboV Evo auto-overclocking dip switch. Of course, it's questionable whether the full 16 lanes is essential for dual-GPU gaming thanks to the enormous 500MB/s per lane delivered by PCI-e 2.0.Īs for non-chipset-related shortcomings, you don't get a handy hardware switches for power, reset and clear CMOS. Where the 890FX can pony up two x16 electrical links, the 880G can only manage two x8 or a single x16. The 880G also plays second squaw to the 890FX discrete chipset in terms of PCI-e lanes. The 880G's Radeon HD 4250 integrated GPU runs at 560MHz to the 890GX's 700MHz Radeon HD 4290 core. The only significant drawbacks involve graphics.

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