890G vs 880G

[Benihana]

Both motherboards are from MSI, and they are both mATX form. I was wondering what is the different from the 880Ghttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130652, versus the 890Ghttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130269.

Also I am wondering if buy an open box one of these is better, because I can get the 890G open box for the same price as the 880G reg. This is going to be in my travel case when I go down to QuakeCon in Dallas.

 

[RGone]

All you have to do is look at the specs and look at the motherboards.

1. The 890GX motherboard has cooling for the VRM circuits and NOT SO the cheaper 880 motherboard.

2. Obviously 890 is better. 890GX is higher end board and its main feature is support for multi-GPU setup as it supports Crossfire of two AMD cards in X8-X8 mode. Also it is equiped with onboard HD 4290 DirectX 10.1 Graphics which is slightly better than IGP of 880G, HD 4250. Most of the 890GX boards come with USB 3.0 and SATA 3 6 Gbps support.

3. If one were certainly going to use an add-in video card and n0t intergrated graphics then boards without the XXXG in the model number would not have intergrated graphics onboard.

 

[trents]

The 880 has only one PCI-e slot and only two memory slots. The 890 has two PCI-e slots and four memory slots. You may say, yeah but I'm only going to use one video card and two sticks of ram. But realize that to support the extra hardware the 890 will have a more robust power phase component. Note also that the 890 board has a heatsink on the VRMs and mosfets (power phase components between the CPU socket and the I/O ports). In short, the 890 board will be a considerably better overclocker.

Having said all that, I would discourage you from buying MSI. They used to be a top flight motherboard maker but no more. We see more problems with MSI on the forum without a doubt than we do with Asus, ASRock and Gigabyte. Don't buy into a headache just to save a few bucks.