Well that's a bit silly, cause 890FXA-UD5 is more expensive than 990FXA-UD5. And the most important thing is that the 9 Series AMD chipsets have SLI ability.
Well, it seems to me that the GA-890FXA-UD5 is still cheaper than the GA-990FXA-UD5. And as for "the most important thing"—well, I would call it the most significant thing—that they come with the "SLI tax". I fact, I believe that this is the reason why they are more expensive.
SLI has no utility for me, I would not put an NVIDIA graphics card into my computer simply for ethical reasons—do you remember their disabling it in the presence of an ATI graphics card? Some people wanted to use a NVIDIA card as, ahem, a FizzX :-) accelerator, while using an ATI card as a graphical card—but this was impossible, because of NVIDIA's policy. In fact, I remember that it was only possible with
"faulty" NVIDIA drivers, as you certainly remember. And I also hate the very concept of the SLI tax, although I suppose that it is much lower than the quoted 50 $ some 6 years ago.
Besides, I have no interest in either a SLI setup, or a Crossfire setup, mainly because it is needlessly expensive, it doubles the power draw, it would require 1 more full-cover waterblock (otherwise it would be rather noisy), etc.
And no, online auction sites (eBay and such) do not look like a viable option, simply because nobody would like to get rid of such a perfect mainboard, at least not at this time, certainly.
I need it for the things mentioned in the original post. I need the PATA port for my DVD burners—I have almost a stockpile of them (3), they are almost new (or almost unused), and I would hate to throw them away and I would like to save myself the hassle of another add-on controller card. I was buying the PATA burners simply because they were always better than their SATA counterparts, simply because SATA drives look like SCSI drives to Windows and older games have had problems with them, I assume you know why (because of the suspected presence of Daemon Tools). So, why not choose a PATA one, right? (Especially when I am such a zealous Intel hater and very conservative when it comes to choosing media for burning.)
However, then there is a bigger problem: all the AMD 900-series mainboards lack an LPT port. And I really need one, at least from time to time, for my EEPROM programmer. Having built it myself, I have something of an emotional attachment to it. Most people bashing me for requiring an LPT port usually have no idea what it is really good for. While they often suggest me an USB replacement, they forget that it is an order of a magnitude harder, I have seen a book on it and its thickness alone made me scared of all such considerations. Not that it would be impossible... but as I am getting older, lazier, less skilful and more stupid, I am more and more reluctant to do such otherwise unnecessary things... Programming for the LPT port is really easy and the cost of its inclusion is very low, as the super I/O chip already provides the functionality, so it is mostly a matter of including the respective header. And with the insane number of USB ports or headers for them, I cannot see a reason why an LPT port could not make it way into the mainboard. E.g. I cannot possibly imagine how a sane person could need more than, say, 8 USB port, let alone 14...! I know that I could get an LPT add-on card, but that costs about 20 € more and comes with the additional nuisance of an otherwise unnecessary add-on card.
Unfortunately, the GA-990FXA-UD5 has neither of these features.
