Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6
Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6 |
| Chipset |
AMD 790FX |
| CPU |
Socket AM2+ Athlon64 HTT 200 MHz |
| Memory |
DDR2 533/667/800/1066 |
| HDD |
1x UltraDMA/133
8x SerialATA II (3xRAID)
|
| Extras |
3 IEEE-1394a
Audio Intel HDA
10 USB 2.0
2x Gigabit Ethernet |
| Price: |
n.a. |
Over a year ago, we tested the ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 chipset codenamed RD580. Then independent ATI pinned great hopes upon that product. And there was a pre-requisite for that: by its specifications, not only was it on par with the competitor products by NVIDIA but was somehow superior over them. However, that chipset had one bottleneck: the little functional south bridge. A year ago, ATI was losing at that so much that its best chip SB450 was one (or two) generation behind. In the end, first boards based on ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 were developed on the 'RD580 + ULi M1575' combination. The latter was also unable to boast powerful expansion options, but in general it allowed creating a modern motherboard.
For the past year, a lot of events have occurred which somehow or other affected the release of new products. First, NVIDIA fully acquired ULi and thus deprived ATI of access to the south bridges. In fact, that did ATI good: they accelerated release of their own south bridge SB600 which offered better specifications than than ULi M1575. Secondly, AMD acquired ATI, which no doubt affected the production plans. As a result, the release of new products by the AMD-ATI alliance was continuously put off, but there was no progress in the development of new south bridges at all. Therefore, currently the most functional south bridge by AMD is SB600. It's just installed on Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6 which we are testing today.
Let me briefly remind the specifications of the SB600 bridge. It offers support for 4 Serial ATA ports and allows merging hard disks into a RAID array of levels 0, 1, 5, and 0+1. It also supports the NCQ (Native Command Queuing) and AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface). Besides, the SB600 chip offers support for one Parallel ATA, 10 USB 2.0 ports, as well as integrated High Definition Audio, and a Gigabit LAN controller.
Eventually, AMD has overcome the problems of integration with ATI and presented the new 790FX chipset (codenamed RD790). We start the review of the novelty with the north bridge. Its major distinctions from RD580 are about support for the HyperTransport 3.0, as well as PCI Express 2.0. At the same time, the number of lanes of the latter has been increased to 42, which allows placing two slots of 16 lanes on each of the board.
Therefore, 10 more bus lanes are remaining, of which 4 ones have been rigidly allocated to communicate the north and south bridges, and 6 can be distributed at the discretion of the engineers. Hence, on the base of RD790 it is impossible to create a motherboard with three PCI Express x16 slots following the (16+8+16) scheme, unless if for some reason we remove 2 lanes from the A-Link 2 bus. But, unless we chase for 16 full-featured lanes per slot, then it is possible to create a motherboards with 4 PCI-E x16 slots, where 8 lanes will be allocated to each slot. In fact, we can see that on the example of Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6.
So, what is the preliminary outcome regarding the AMD RD790 chipset? No doubt, AMD has managed to make a big leap forward through releasing this product: the specifications of the north bridge are almost on par with competitors by NVIDIA or Intel (of course, if AMD releases a version of RD790 for the Intel platform). However, the situation with the south bridge fully repeats the situation a long ago: the capabilities of SB600 are extremely weak as per today's standards. The situation can be fixed by the release of the SB700 bridge in which AMD promises support for 6 SATA II links (with RAID 0,1,0+1), support for eSATA, 14(!) USB ports, as well as IDM (Intelligent Device Management), and TPM (Trusted Platform Module), 1 PATA link with support for HyperFlash. Besides, another south bridge - SB750 - is planned for release. But if these chips are released with a delay, the situation with ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 will repeat: the chipset RD790 can be ignored by the developers of motherboards.
Before we move on to the tests, we should note that Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6 is an engineering sample, with a preliminary PCB design (to be more precise - revision 0.3) and the debugging version of BIOS.
Therefore, we'll note all the found shortcomings but take them indulgently.
Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6 Specifications
| Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6 |
| CPU |
- AMD Athlon 64/Sempron with the bus speed 200 MHz
- Socket AM2+ |
| Chipset |
- North bridge AMD RD790
- South bridge AMD SB600;
- Interbridge communication: A-Link 2
|
| System Memory |
- Four 240-pin slots for DDR2 SDRAM DIMM;
- Maximum memory capacity 8 GB;
- Supported memory DDR2 533/667/800/1066
- Dual-channel memory access |
| Graphics |
- Four PCI Express x16 slots |
| Expansion options |
- Two 32-bit PCI Bus Master slots;
- One PCI Express x1 slot;
- Ten USB 2.0 ports (6 integrated + 4 additional);
- Three IEEE1394 ports (Firewire; one integrated + 2 additional)
- Integrated High Definition Audio 7.1
- Two Gigabit Ethernet LAN controllers
|
| Overclocking options |
- HTT adjustable within 200 to 500 MHz in 1 MHz increments; multiplier adjustable;
- Adjustable voltages on the CPU, memory, HTT, HTR, PCI-E, and the chipset (nb + sb)
- EasyTune 5
|
| Disk subsystem |
- 1 link for UltraDMA133/100/66/33 Bus Master IDE (SB600; with support for up to 2 ATAPI devices)
- Support for SerialATA II (4 lines - SB600, with support for RAID 0,1,0+1, 5)
- Support for SerialATA II (4 lines - 2x Gigabyte SATA2, with support for RAID 0, 1,JBOD) ;
- Support for LS-120 / ZIP / ATAPI CD-ROM |
| BIOS |
- 2x8 Mbit Flash ROM
- Award BIOS Phoenix with support for Enhanced ACPI, DMI, Green, PnP Features, and Trend Chip Away Virus
- Gigabyte Q-Flash;
- @BIOS, and Face-Wizard;
- Gigabyte Virtual Dual BIOS |
| Misc |
- One port for FDD, one serial and one parallel port, ports for PS/2 mouse and keyboard
- STR (Suspend to RAM)
- SPDIF In/Out
|
| Power management |
- Wake-up on modem, mouse, keyboard, LAN, timer, and USB;
- Main 24-pin ATX power connector;
- Additional 8-pin power connector;
- Additional 4-pin Molex power connector;
|
| Monitoring |
- Monitoring the temperature of the CPU, system, rotational speed of the four fans
- SmartFan;
|
| Dimensions |
- ATX form factor, 245 mm x 305 mm (9.63" x 12") |
Package
Contents:
- Motherboard
- User's Manual in English* + Brief manual*
- 1x software & drivers DVD
- One ATA133 cable, FDD cable
- Four SerialATA cables
- 2x External SerialATA cables + 2 power supply adapters (2 connectors)
- Two external modules to plug in SerialATA devices
- A cap for the rear panel of the housing*
We note it straight that the board is an engineering sample, so we can't judge about the package bundle of the final product. Nevertheless, we note the presence of two brackets for plugging in two external SerialATA devices, as well as two eSATA cables with two respective power supply adapters.
We also note the small number of power adapters for SATA devices, a lack of bracket for LPT and USB ports. We were unable to get familiarized with the user's guide, but a brochure like that must be a mandatory item in the package bundle. As regards the DVD, it contains all the required Gigabyte drivers and utilities, as well as third-party software: Norton and Kaspersky anti-viruses.
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