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Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H
Gigabyte is one of the first manufacturers to bring out a retail board using AMD's latest 790GX chipset, in the shape of the GA-MA790GP-DS4H, which is a bit of a mouthful for a nice and feature-rich motherboard.
Built around AMD's Socket A+, the MA790GP-DS4H supports all AM2/AM2+ processors up to and including the latest 140W Phenom, with its five phase power regulation. Gigabyte has teamed up the 790GX with the latest AMD Southbridge, the SB750, and both are passively cooled with copper heatsinks.
The Northbridge cooler is connected to the passive power regulator cooler via a pair of heat pipes. Gigabyte can get away without using any fans on the board because the chipsets are built on a 55nm process and consume little power. Also helping are the solid aluminium capped capacitors and power efficient MOSFETS.
Four DIMM slots are provided which support up to 8GB of 533/667/800/1066MHz, DDR2 memory.
Generally the board is well laid out with all the slots and ports in a myriad of different colours in the normal Gigabyte way, but there's a couple of annoying exceptions. The six SATA ports are placed flat on the board, just under the second PCI-E slot. This is OK, but - and its a big but - this board supports CrossFire X and you lose access to some of the ports if you add in a second card: two are lost if you add a single-slot card like an HD4850, but if you add a dual-slot cooler card you could end up losing all but one of the ports.
Other manufacturers get around this problem by edge-mounting the ports at ninety degrees, and why Gigabyte didn't follow this trend only it knows.
Another potential source of problems is the placement of the extra USB headers, which are tucked up tight against the second PCI-E slot making them almost impossible to access in a case with a second graphics card fitted in the slot.
The 790GX supports CrossFire X and Hybrid CrossFire X, so as well as the two x16 PCI-E slots you also get integrated graphics. The two PCI-E graphics slots run at x16 with a single card and dual x8 in CrossFire X mode. Hybrid graphics allows you to use low-end graphics cards (in ATI's case, Radeon HD2400 and HD3400 series cards) combined with the integrated graphics to boost the 3D performance.
The integrated HD3300 graphics have a core clock speed of 700MHz with the shader clock running at the same speed. The Northbridge supports DDR2/DDR3 via SidePort technology and Gigabyte has added 128MB of GDDR3 SidePort memory to boost the performance of the integrated part. The HD3300 can still access up to 512MB of local system memory.
The BIOS is an overclocker's delight: one glance at the main page in the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker (MIT) section tells you all you need to know. Adjustments can be made to almost anything you can think of.
Six SATA 3Gb/s ports controlled by the Southbridge support RAID 1, 0, 1+0 and, thanks to the new SB750 chip, RAID 5.
Integrated audio is supplied by a Realtek ALC889A, eight-channel HD audio codec which supports content protection for both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. It is also can also play back at 1080p. A Realtek 8111C chip brings Gigabit Ethernet integration.
The rear panel of the GA-MA790GP-DS4H shows a hint of what the board can be used for, as it comes with VGA, DVI-D and HDMI output ports, added to which are six audio ports, an optical S/PDIF out port, a Firewire port and four USB ports (it supports another eight via headers on the board) plus two PS/2 ports.
Both the DVI-D and HDMI ports support HDCP but there are limitations in so far as you can't use them together; the chipset only has a single digital output and you can't use a normal VGA adaptor on the DVI port as its DVI-D, so for dual displays you have to use the VGA port plus one other.
The hardware bundled in the box seems a bit lightweight compared to many of today's boards, but what you do get is all useful; two ATA data cables, four SATA data cables (these have clip locks on them and one pair has ninety degree connectors) and a two-port USB back plate.
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