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880 vs 990 chipset?

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Aldakoopa

KING OF PROCRASTINATION Member
Joined
Jan 11, 2012
Location
North Carolina
I'm a little confused about the difference between them. I tried looking it up, but the only thing I really found is that the 990 supports SLI, which won't matter to me anyway.

I'm currently using an 880 chipset in my build that I finished last month, but I was trying to stay on a budget, and this motherboard had everything I needed and then some. I was building a moderate gaming rig, and I think I succeeded, because this thing performs beyond what I expected, but pretty much anything was an upgrade from my 5 year old Dell with a 9500 GT and 2.9 GHz Athlon 2x.

I'm not going to upgrade even if there are benefits that I could use on the 990, I was just curious of what I might have missed out on if I had looked a little harder and known a little more.
 
You missed nothing really of value if you did n0t wish a motherboard with a guaranteed upgrade path to a new FX series processor.

by the way a g00gle search with terms like this will show the differences.
890 vs 990 chipset.
 
I'm using the FX-4100 on an M5A88-V Evo, but it was already guaranteed to work with Bulldozer. I mean, I did Google, but like I said, I could only find that 990 supports SLI and the 880 only supports Crossfire, which doesn't bother me at all because I'm an AMD fan anyway. :D

I was just wondering if there were any real performance gains I was missing out on, which there didn't seem to be any from what results I got.
 
There is a sort of 'secretly understood' thing about AMD releasing a chipset to go with the cpu since AMD went back into the chipset business. The newer 990 chipset is supposed to be different in how voltages are handled for the later FX series cpu. There are always things in the white papers given to the motherboard makers that strongly suggest the motherboard maker do X to use the chipset/cpu combo on a motherboard when manufactured. In the case of 890 to 990 and FX support, some mobo companies felt their previous boards or make that certain of their mobo's could meet the newer cpu/chipset spec with a bios upgrage and thus you got 890 mobo's that support FX processor. I am afraid that I most likely would buy 990 chipset for FX processor, but that is me. YMMV and you may well never see any difference at all.

You have already stated you are not going to upgrade your board so there is really still nothing about the 990 chipset that is of real interest to your working system.
 
There is a sort of 'secretly understood' thing about AMD releasing a chipset to go with the cpu since AMD went back into the chipset business. The newer 990 chipset is supposed to be different in how voltages are handled for the later FX series cpu. There are always things in the white papers given to the motherboard makers that strongly suggest the motherboard maker do X to use the chipset/cpu combo on a motherboard when manufactured. In the case of 890 to 990 and FX support, some mobo companies felt their previous boards or make that certain of their mobo's could meet the newer cpu/chipset spec with a bios upgrage and thus you got 890 mobo's that support FX processor. I am afraid that I most likely would buy 990 chipset for FX processor, but that is me. YMMV and you may well never see any difference at all.

You have already stated you are not going to upgrade your board so there is really still nothing about the 990 chipset that is of real interest to your working system.

Yeah, I'm happy with how it works and the amount I spent on it, but this was my first build and I'm still learning what works best. Of course, by the time I need to build a new system I'll have to re-learn all over again. Thanks for the answer! And glad to know that I don't have to regret going with the 880. XD
 
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