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Review Conclusion
of
Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H AMD
790GX+SB750 mainboard Conclusion
This is our first 790GX+SB750 board tested at our labs. This board has some of the neatest feature set available for the AMD platform. Although we have seen some brands of 780G being hacked to do what the 790GX, e.g. support of CrossFireX, the 790GX is still the official chipset as this new breed of north bridges clocks higher and more stable than the 780G north bridge. The 2nd difference is the inclusion of the new South bridge SB750 which now officially supports RAID 5. Power users who intend to use it as a workstation can utilize for data redundancy. 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, 1394 etc. So far, this board seems to be the most complete. To further enhance the performance of the on board IGP, Gigabyte has embedded a 128MB Sideport memory using the Elipda chip. The side port memory was first available on a 780G board we tested before. As we can see, the improvement can be further increased with overclocking the GPU core to 1GHz. The wide range of GPU clk option and NB voltage allows it to be o/c beyond the 1GHz limit, perhaps by adding a fan on the North bridge itself. As for CPU overclocking, the BIOS do have options to set the HTT (200~500MHz), multiplier, async memory settings and voltage options. See gallery for more information. In our test with the max HTT we can reach only 365 x on a AMD X2 5000+ black edition. The settings used can be seen below (with RAM setting in bios set to DDR400 and HT multiplier to 4x). The result is the same even when we use an external graphics card. Perhaps a new BIOS can help.
Supported on the SB750 (SB) of the Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H 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.
Below is a screen shot of the final clock overclocking the Phenom 9550 to 11x255. That is an o/c from 2.2GHz -> 2.8GHz. 
In terms of expansion, Gigabyte has many options available. In addition to HDMI , D-SUB, DVI-D all on board., it also has 1394 support. In conclusion, Gigabyte has again come out with a complete solution for HTPC users. The 1394 is definitely one of the plus points of this board. With it's capability of playing back of HD movies in H.264/VC-1 with lower CPU utilisation, this chipset and board is definitely the best choice for a HTPC. Gamers will also love it as it supports more o/c options than before. Pros
Cons
Ratings Here are my ratings out of 10.
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