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Review Conclusion of Biostar TA790GX A2+ AMD 790GX+SB750 mainboard
Bluetooth 4 Sep 2008

Conclusion

Biostar TA790GX A2+ ver 5 is our 2nd board that came to our testing labs some time ago. This AMD 790GX+SB750 board has almost all the features that you need, supported by the AMD SB750 south bridge. As you are probably aware, the AMD 790GX supports not only Sideport for better IGP performance, it also supports Hybrid CrossFire and also CrossFireX (with dual 8x slots). Thus, this board is a master of all.

Features-wise, the board is equipped with a 2 PCIe x16 slot which can work in a single PCIe x16 or Dual PCIe x8 in CrossFire mode. There are also 6 SATA II ports supporting raid 0,1,5,0+1. There is also GbE, HDA, HDMI, USB. The board does support sideport memory with a 64MB chip This is probably the reason why you see a slightly lower 3D performance when the board is compared to a 128M sideport memory board.

As for CPU overclocking, the BIOS comes with a wide range of options including memory timing, voltages, wide range of HTT etc. See gallery for more information. You could also use the supplied BIOSTAR o/c tool in the CDROM to overclock the board. In addition, on the SB750 (SB) of the board is the Embedded Controller for AMD OverDrive- Advanced Clock Calibration. With that, we can run AMD Overdrive to overclock the CPU cores by adding a 4% increase in all the 4 cores through this option below.

Using a Phenom 9550 with a multiplier of 11x, we managed to overclock the processor to around 2.8GHz. See picture below. On some other boards, 230x11 is already an achievement.

In conclusion, Biostar has tap the power of the AMD 790GX, making it one of the best solutions for all users. As it uses a 64MB sideport, we expect it to be priced more competitively to other 128M variants, Be it a desktop application user, a gamer, you can use various technologies supported to tap the power of the quad core Phenom. It is definitely an all rounder.

Discuss

Pros

  • Excellent Image quality
  • Low CPU Utilization when playing back VC-1
  • HDMI, D-SUB, DVI-D interfaces all on board
  • Hybrid CrossFire and CrossFire Support
  • Power On/off and reset switches

Cons

  • 64M Sideport should have 128M
  • No 1394 on board
  • Require peddle card for external VGA card

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.

 Category

Score

 Performance

8 / 10

 Features

9 / 10

 Ease Of Installation

10 / 10

 Overclocking Features

9 / 10

 Documentation

7 / 10

 Packaging

7 / 10

 Cost / Performance

9 / 10

 Overall Rating :

8.4 / 10

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