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Preview: Asus M4A89GTD Pro/Usb3 Upgrade Question


jm764

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I have an old Asus M4A89GTD Pro/Usb3 mobo with the following specs:

Cpu: Phenom II 955 Black Edition (OC'ed at 4.0ghz) with last beta bios update.
Gpu: Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 OC with Boost Edition (Stock Speed)
Ram: 16gb of DDR3 at 1333 mhz (Stock Speed)

This system has served me well over the last 4 years, but it's now showing it's age so I want to give it an upgrade to revive it's usefulness.

I plan to be doing video editing, video game/program compiling, 3d rendering, and it will also double as my Windows XP era gaming rig as my newer i7 rig has taken over my gaming/video recording duties as of late. Also performance wise the i7 rig is exactly twice as fast as the Phenom II rig in every test I've performed with it.

I want to upgrade the Phenom II rig to the following:

Cpu: FX-8350 (Stock speed with boost clock disabled as the mobo can't handle cpu speeds past 4.0ghz without broken throttling.) Cost about $120.
Gpu: ASUS ROG STRIX Radeon Rx 480 8GB OC Edition (or the rumored "RX 485" if it actually becomes a real gpu by then) along with the Radeon HD 7970 for XP when needed. Cost about $250
Ram 32 GB of DDR3 at any speed (Ram speed doesn't seem to matter too much for the programs/task I use). Cost $20 - $120

So my question is simply, "Is it possible"?

I've seen post where people have gotten the FX-8350 to work with the last beta bios, and others with 32 GB of ram, but none with both together.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/352984-28-will-support-8350-black-edition-core-processor-piledriver
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/310542-30-upgrade-asus-m4a89gtd

Obviously I understand a newer PC would probably be best at these price points, but the main reason for spending this much is the fact that I use this PC to repair old PCs and other old tech all the time and this pc has every port I'd ever need (including serial and parallel ports from a pci card I added) to repair them plus Win XP compatibility on one of the fastest cpus it can run on.

The biggest upgrade will be the Cpu so I want to know if anyone else has had success getting this board to work with this cpu.
The GPU will be last as the Radeon HD 7970 still works just fine for most things, though it's starting to wear out and fail so a new gpu may be needed soon.
Finally can I use PC3-8500R memory with this board? I use PC3200R in my old Asus A8N-SlI Premium build. I can easily get 32GB of PC3-8500R server ECC ram for $20 so I don't have to spend $120 on the ram I wanted to get for it.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Server Ram is often registered, which the "R" may hint to, while desktop Cpu often demand unregistered Ram. You could check that point.

Ram speed without influence: that's unexpected to me. Especially for video editing, I though Dram throughput would be the one limiting factor, even more so if your future Cpu has 8 cores.

I didn't grasp the two graphics cards. Do you plan to build them in and out as you switch the OS? That would be unbearable, to my opinion. With the same processing power as the Rx 480, you have the Gtx 780, which has drivers for Xp (v340.52) - the main difference is that it's dX11 instead of dX12.

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On 11/17/2016 at 6:09 PM, pointertovoid said:

Server Ram is often registered, which the "R" may hint to, while desktop Cpu often demand unregistered Ram. You could check that point.

Ram speed without influence: that's unexpected to me. Especially for video editing, I though Dram throughput would be the one limiting factor, even more so if your future Cpu has 8 cores.

I didn't grasp the two graphics cards. Do you plan to build them in and out as you switch the OS? That would be unbearable, to my opinion. With the same processing power as the Rx 480, you have the Gtx 780, which has drivers for Xp (v340.52) - the main difference is that it's dX11 instead of dX12.

Well as far as I know, all AMD processors since the 939 socket Athlon 64's support registered ram, so it's up to the motherboard's manufacturer to enable it which Asus seems to do with all their higher end boards like this one since the socket 939.

Probably but since I'll just be using it to batch render things when I need it then I can leave it on for a day or two if need be so timeliness doesn't bother me too much. Aslo I tried the same ram in this pc in my newer one and it really didn't slow things down at all so it all seems to be cpu based as far as I can tell.

I haven't really had good experiences with Nvidia cards past or present even with my GTX 1070 in my i7 rig due to a ton of minor issues that seem to plauge me no matter what, so I'm avoiding Nvidia cards when I can.

Probably, but the gpu was bought with the potential for running dual HD Radeon 7990s when I first got it so I have plenty of power and space in my rig to run two cards though the HD 7970 still holds up pretty well, I just want a great DX12 card should I need it, puss I could use this machine in the future to do VR game testing in another room of my house when I get a VR headset.

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Working with ECC RAM is just tricky, if it's just ECC unbuffered in most cases it will work, buffered I never got to work.

The 10 series nVidia cards are good, no driver problems other then in some cases a reduction in memory speed when the card came OCed from the factory. The AMD drivers are not that great either and this is why I switched a week a go to the nVidia 1060 3GB from a AMD x280 card due to the fact that it has a TDP of less than half of the 280x and it supports HDMI2.0. Switching to a new card gave me a HUGE performance upgrade as now I can use the 4k screen at 60Hz; everything runs smoother, especially in the 3D drawing software I'm using. The Rx480 is a great card for sure, can't say what is best for you but I would check out some benchmarks for the software you are using with the video card rendering enabled (if it has that).

You also know that Intel is better for video editing, it's just that AMD is more focused on the APU stuff that go into mobile devices these days. AMD still has to release (2017) their new Zen chip that looks promising... Don't know, would consider DDR4 on a standard motherboard and a i5/i7 and enjoy it for the next 4 years, keep the AMD for the repairs/testing you do. This is, if you have the cash to spare, but the Intel is the best investment in the long run.

-Ronald

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