GIGABYTE MA790FXT-UD5P AM3 Motherboard

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Our Rating: 87%       Manufacturer: GIGABYTE

The Board

Unfortunately with this board GIGABYTE didn’t provide us a retail package for us to review, so we skipped straight onto the board itself. GIGABYTE uses the same large ATX PCB that we know and love; a blue base with 6 layers on a 30x24cm size. The layout itself is extremely neat.

The 24-pin power connector, IDE and FDD connector are located behind the four DDR3 memory slots, with the 4/8 pin EPS connector behind the PS/2 tower ports on the left hand side.

The CPU is fed its power through a 10 phase voltage system; eight go to the CPU core, while the other two run the memory controller and integrated CPU northbridge for a more stable power supply. The Mosfets are cooled by a large pipe assembly that surprisingly doesn’t get in the way of any large aftermarket heatsinks. The heatpipe also cools the 790FX Northbridge and the SB.

On the right hand edge of the board GIGABYTE places its mass storage connectors. There are a total of 10 SATA ports; six blue ones which are run off the SB750 and four white ones running off two Jmicron based SATA controllers in GIGABYTE’s backup RAID array.

Moving along to the rear I/O connectors, GIGABYTE uses the same port layout as we have seen for the DQ6 line of boards. There are no additional extras, just the same port config which is extremely good for uniformity.

Lastly, we are on expansion slots. Thanks to the 790FX chipset this board gets two PCIe x16 slots at full speed; that’s 32 lanes dedicated just for graphics. GIGABYTE has taken advantage of this and places two blue graphics card slots for CrossfireX setups. Unfortunately AMD doesn’t have SLI licensing, so no SLI setups here guys. Three PCIe x1 slots and two PCI slots make up the final arrangement.