AMD 870 Mainboards Roundup: Asus, Biostar, Gigabyte and MSI
 

Well, we have reached this final chapter of our roundup in a pretty disappointed mood, although we started this article with a triumphant intention. This summer we tested mainboards on AMD 890FX chipset that cost around $200 or even more than that. All mainboards were generally very good, but investing in them is only justified if you intend to have several graphics cards. If you only wanted to use one graphics accelerator, then it would make much more sense to go for an AMD 870 based mainboard that costs half as much and offers almost the same functionality. This was what we thought at the time. It is true, these two chipsets differ only by the number of available PCI Express lines and your ability to group them as necessary. Their South Bridges are the same and offer identical functionality. However, to our regret, the actual mainboards based on these two chipsets turned out dramatically different.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mai...0-roundup.html