Gigabyte is the first to market with an AMD 790GX powered motherboard. So how can it best the already impressive 780G?
AMD’s recent 780G chipset finally gave cheapskate gamers an integrated graphics solution capable of running more than just Solitaire. World of Warcraft, Half Life 2, and even Call of Duty 4 are all playable at medium resolutions, thanks to the Radeon HD 3200 that pulses at the heart of AMD’s impressive chipset. So how could AMD improve on this already imposing chipset? The answer is the 790GX, which has four main new features that make it an even more capable PC backbone. Gigabyte is the first company to hit the APC labs with a 790GX-powered beastie, in the form of the GA-MA790GP-DS4H.
If you’ve got a stash of liquid nitrogen in the freezer for world record overclocking attempts, you’ll probably know all about AMD’s Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) feature. Unfortunately, AMD won’t spill the beans on how it works. All we know is that it’s meant to provide a measurable increase in the overclock of any given chip when compared to a non-ACC motherboard.
It’s easy enough to enable – just hit Ctrl+F1 to view the advanced BIOS options and, voila, there it is. There’s the option to enable ACC on each individual core, as well as a percentage value. Given that it’s one of the board’s biggest differentiators, we have to question why it’s not mentioned in the manual, or on the Gigabyte website. Such an oversight is inexcusable. Due to this, we have no idea what the difference is between 2% and 12% ACC, but after a little online research, heard that AMD recommends between 4% and 6%. We found no difference in our overclock between the two, with both settings giving our X2 6000+ an extra 150Mhz over previous overclocks. Not too shabby, but given that the total overclock was still only 15% over stock speed, it’s not enough to leapfrog AMD’s chips into the #1 spot for tweakers.
The other major area to receive attention is the integrated Radeon HD 3200. It’s now 200MHz faster, resulting in it being renamed the Radeon HD 3300. It also has its own 128MB of onboard DDR3-1333 memory. This onboard memory should show up in all 790GX mobos, but it’s up to the manufacturer to implement. The 3300 can be used in a hybrid configuration with a single discrete video card, while the third major addition to the board is CrossFire support. Two 8x PCI Express lanes are ready and waiting for your ATI cards, but if you plan to use the board’s CrossFire capabilities, the onboard 3300 chip will lay idle. Compared to NVIDIA’s implementation of a similar technology, which allows its integrated graphics to still be used even in SLI systems, this seems like a bit of a waste, especially when there’s expensive DDR3 memory sitting there doing nothing.
The final major addition comes courtesy of the SB750 southbridge. Answering the same functionality in the GeForce 8300 chipset, this southbridge now offers RAID 5 array support. While we couldn’t test AMD’s claims, apparently its performance in this regard beats Intel's ICH10R when used with three drives, but not with four.
So then, this Gigabyte board offers better overclocking, faster integrated graphics, CrossFire and RAID 5 support. Performance in our PC Mark Vantage show that it’s one of the quickest AMD chipsets available, though our overclock results also show that ACC isn’t quite the saviour for AMD tweaking that many hoped it to be. The only issue we can see is the price point – it’s much more expensive than Gigabyte’s 780G-powered motherboard, the similarly specced GA-MA78GM-S2H, which retails for $90. With the GA-MA790GP-DS4H, at $180, you get CrossFire support, a slightly faster graphics core, RAID 5 and ACC... and that’s about it. So unless these features are worth an extra hundred bucks to you, we reckon the 780G powered version will suit your needs just as ably.