I wish somebody sued or something and forced manufacturers to either not tie NIC's to old/slow PCI or force them to not call it gigabit, after all at the very best when ONLY using the NIC on the PCI lanes you have 1/3rd of a Gb and not 1Gb, and if you use a PCI soundcard or something simultaneously then it sinks even more.

Perhaps more modern chipsets would in general run much smoother and better if they didn't have to deal with trying to handle old PCI.
I wonder what would happen if TR disabled all PCI and related stuff in the BIOS and ran some test.

The SB600 appears to have some PCI performance quirks, as well, with the Gigabyte and MSI boards delivering much lower PCI throughput than our nForce 590 SLI platform.
I don't know if you can call a 10% or less deficit 'much lower'. It's more like a bit lower. Secondly, being slower doesn't make it quirky. Quirky means that it's not working with everything.

Obviously AHCI and SB600 don't go good together with Vista but that's something we already know since Vista came out.
But did you test the serial ata performance on AHCI mode or IDE mode? Because i would like to know if the 'write performance' goes up on IDE mode. (and also application performance like Worldbench)
I also observed a low 'write performance' on the auxiliary controllers. It seems to me that the SB600's AHCI mode drags performance down across the board.
Secondly i don't know how important AHCI is to consumers. Native Command Queuing and SATA device hot-swapping are something that 5% of consumers will need. Native Command Queuing doesn't improve performance for consumer applications and you don't use SATA device hot-swapping when your case is closed. You seem to point to AHCI as a necessity but i think it's not.
Maybe this is a good situation where you should make a comparison with WindowsXP to see how much the performance differs.

While you did a great job at pointing out the negatives, you forgot to mention some of the positive stuff. Things like PCI-E 2.0, 4 PCI-E slots and the fact that the MSI board is cheaper than almost all nV 590 boards.
I saw a Crossfire review with two 3870's on a X38 board and it seems PCI-E 2.0 helps a lot in Crossfire mode.

Just trying to be subjective objective here. I also agree with #16.

So, I guess the conclusion is the chipset is great, but it limited by the dated southbridge.

But where does that leave us as compared to nVidia's SLI chipset.

Which is the better choice, today?

something to try: vlite (http://www.vlite.net/) can presumably let you roll your hotfix(es) directly into the installation.

I have an idea. Buy a mainboard with some x1 PCIe slots, and an x4 slot, in addition to the x16, and use those to bypass the southbridge for everything important. Stick a PCIe SATA card in the x4 slot (wouldn't want to limit it with x1), a USB/Firewire card in an x1, maybe a sound card, make sure the board has PCIe Gigabit LAN. All set. Of course, you'd have to find a board priced as if there were no southbridge at all, and none of those PCIe cards are particularly inexpensive. At least the system would perform better.

Off topic just barely...

So, when is Intel going to drop the bomb, and sell quad core for under $200?

Quote from Digitimes:
"Although the Radeon HD 3800 series was launched three weeks later than the GeForce 8800 GT, Radeon 3800 demand has started to pick up, bringing the market shares of Nvidia and AMD from 90% and 10%, originally, to 70% and 30%."

My point is we need to think critically, and even strategically, when reading product reviews. AMD is making real headway with the affordable 3800 cards. While the Phenom might not be ready for prime time, both the Radeon 3800 and 790FX chipsets are clearly winners.

A review that concludes "...right in line with competing nForce 590 SLI boards." while suggesting the 790 has "issues" is clearly steering people to the nvidia direction, which would likely mean away from the Radeon as well.

While TechReport writers may not be quite this devious, I can assure you Intel marketing certainly is, and they're likely planting sentiments with many well read review sites.

I'm not sure I should be surprised, that once again, TechReport outdoes it self in bashing AMD/ATI product.

Every other review I've read said nothing touches the 790fx chipset for performance, despite the current phenom being the weak link.

Techreport takes the opportunity to bash not once, but twice.

I'm sorry, but TechReport appears to have a clear Intel bias at this point.

Btw, AMD will be around for a very long time.

lots of n00bs to the site i guess, TR bashed the crap out of intel during the netburst era, which i thought was cool cause netburst was a flaming turd.

any perceived anti AMD bias might be because intel currently has a better product?

Because of price/performance/value for my needs, I haven't had an Intel system since my first PC, a 486 in 1995. But I just changed my X2 4200+/nforce570 (with a slight overclock to 2.4GHz, the best I could get without spending more time tweaking, and 2.5GHz was able to run but not stable) to a Core 2 Duo E6420/P35, which I've got overclocked to 2.8GHz with minor tweaking (3.2GHz was possible with no tweaks, and ran Windows, but didn't always boot).

The CPU cost $167, the P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP mainboard was $200. CompUSA's going out of business sales are really nice for some items.

Thanks for the update.
I really wanna go all AMD for my next major upgrade, so I guess i'll wait a bit more.

And pluscard's posts just continue to highlight an extremely annoying trend I've been seeing on hardware sites:

Any review site that doesn't automagically declare any crap that AMD puts out to be the most powerful hardware in the universe MUST have a pro-Intel/anti-AMD agenda. The only hardware reviews they consider 'legitimate' are ones that laud AMD non-stop, from start to finish, regardless of the actual quality and performance of the product.

It really is disgusting to see. My first two system builds were AMD, and they were rock solid and awesome. Yet for some bizarre reason I haven't developed this utterly irrational wank-habit for their brand. I'm not sure why...

I don't think TR has an anti-AMD bias at all.

Like in any other publication, however, different writers have differing opinions on various subjects--some of those opinions are well-formed and some are not--and sometimes you see these imperfections coming through. But that only makes TR exactly like every other publication you might care to read....;)

Speaking of opinions and how they slant coverage of various issues, the "TLB erratum" stories were handled in a level-headed way by some sites and exaggerated to to an extreme by other sites. Personally, I think the only site to date that I've read that placed that particular subject in the context it deserved was [H] --I think Kyle framed and explained the issue exactly as it should have been presented. But let's not forget that when Intel had some P4 erratum a few years ago, sites like AnandTech went way overboard with it at the time to the extent of so badly distorting the issue that it could scarcely be understood in the context in which it actually existed. OTOH, the Core 2 erratum which both Intel and Microsoft to date have publicized and documented has been almost completely ignored.

The problem, of course, is that sometimes people being imperfect as we all are, we fear making mistakes. Some of us are less fearful of that than others, though, which is why some people presented the "TLB erratum" in its proper context--that is, a minor erratum affecting a very small number of people and which AMD is correcting in the next revision of the chip, whereas other people covered the erratum as if it meant the entire cpu was ruined, worthless, and not fit for consumption by human beings...;)

It's always best to be widely read, imo, as you stand a better chance of getting a clearer picture of just about any situation than you do if you restrict yourself to single source of information. But I'm sure this is news to nobody...;)

Guys, if I can go all AMD and get my moneys worth, why not?
How about a newer 790FX board w/ the new SB, B3 Phenom, and a 3870 or better for around $300.
That aint bad and I could re-use my DDR2.

If they drop the phenom and video card in price, it could happen

Any chance of performing the IOMeter tests in XP?

TR said: "By then, AMD should have B3-stepping Phenom chips available that correct the TLB erratum, as well."

I'm afraid that if this is correct:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20071226214456_Advanced_Mi..._Devices_Faces_Further_Delays_of_Phenom_Processo...[bs.com]

Then the B3 Stepping is further delayed into Q2 2008. AMD just seems to be a laughing stock at the moment.