Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6
Expansion options
Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6 uses the south bridge SB600 with a radiator. Therefore, the board supports four SerialATA II ports (yellow connectors) and allows merging hard disks into RAID arrays of levels 0,1,5, and 10.
On the one hand, four SATA links are quite sufficient for the average system, but competitors offer more links! That is why engineers at Gigabyte have installed two additional Gigabyte SATA2 controllers onboard (made by JMicron). One of the chips provides support for two SerialATA II links which are brought to the board's left-hand edge. The other chip allowed bringing 2 SerialATA II links to the board's rear panel. Therefore, as many as 10 hard disks (8 SATA + 2 PATA) altogether can be plugged in to Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6.
Then, the board offers 10 USB 2.0 ports. Six of them are fitted on the rear panel, with 4 more plugged in with brackets (missing in the package bundle). Besides, the motherboard supports the IEEE1394 ("Firewire"). For that, there is a Texas Instruments' TSB43AB23 controller onboard.
Therefore, the board offers support for 3 Firewire ports: one located on the rear panel, with another two connected with a bracket (missing in the package bundle).
Then, Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6 offers 8-channel Intel High Definition Audio, with ALC889A used as the codec.
A few words on the network support: the board uses two high-speed LAN controllers: Realtek RTL8111B (Gigabit Ethernet):
The board's rear panel has an original configuration.
We note the lack of LPT an one of COM ports, and LPT are implemented with a bracket (missing in the package bundle), and the second COM port is not at all provided by the PCB design. On the other hand, on the panel there is an optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs, a Firewire port, as well as two SerialATA ports.
Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6 completely lacks any jumpers, and to reset the CMOS settings a 2-pin CLR_CMOS connector positioned near the battery is used.
Now on to the BIOS settings.
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