USB and SATA 3.0 début on an AMD platform.
AMD's platform has seen quite a lot of love over time, a love that continues to grow deep within large manufacturers such as GIGABYTE (like a tumour, but much less deadly). While the latest features such as heatsink design and other aspects don't quite make it to these boards as fast as its current flavour-of-the-month P55 boards, it didn't take long for a 790FX-based board to get a refresh.
The 790FX chipset is getting along in years now, though it's still pretty potent as an enthusiast chip due to the large amount of PCIe lanes it offers. Similar to the X58 on Intel's side, the 790FX provides capacity for Triple Crossfire, though on this board the performance will be slightly hindered due to the third slot being limited to only 8x electrically. The reason for this limitation is the addition of other devices that use those extra PCIe lanes; but we'll get to those soon.
This board offers compatibility with socket AM3 processors, as well as DDR3 memory in dual channel. The power delivery around the socket is placed underneath aluminium heatsinks that are joined with a single (very long) nickel heatpipe, threading the power delivery with the Northbridge and Southbridge chipsets. It proved excellent at managing temperatures, and only minimal airflow was needed to keep a check on temps.
The 8-pin CPU power connector is nestled between this cooling array and the I/O panel, though you'll need the fingers of an acrobat to access it easily once installed within a case alongside a large aftermarket heatsink. Thankfully, the 24-pin ATX power connector is in its typically easy-to-reach spot, and even more helpfully there are hard power and reset buttons placed here. This seems pretty small, but when you've got two graphics cards on top of a sound card and RAID card installed you'll love it.
There's even a hard clear CMOS button on-board, wearing a protective plastic cap that avoids accidental erasing of your precious overclocking settings. Sitting next to this button are the six SATA 2.0 ports from the SB750 Southbridge chip, joined by two white SATA 3.0 ports that are powered by an onboard Marvell chip. They're all right-angled for easy cabling, and there's the full bandwidth available. Not only is there SATA 3.0 on this board, but GIGABYTE's engineers have also packed USB 3.0 in as well.
A NEC chip powers two blue ports of USB 3.0 goodness at the rear I/O panel, joined by an impressive collection of other ports: two PS/2, Optical/Coaxial, 6/4-pin Firewire, four USB 2.0 and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. GIGABYTE has also applied its 333 tech to all the USB ports, giving three times the amperage of the standard spec so you can charge all kinds of things from them, and run 2.5in HDDs more reliably.
Everything 3.0 on this mobo is powered directly from the chipset's PCIe lanes, giving the full bandwidth to all devices at all times. This is great news for those looking to upgrade their AMD rig for the next storage interfaces, and is a much more elegant solution compared to what we've seen with some P55 motherboards.
All along this board has been great, except for its overclocking performance. We managed only 3760MHz (235x16 @ 1.475V) maximum, and even running at 3675MHz (15x245 @ 1.475V) it wasn't stable. While this may be improved at a later date with BIOS updates, it's still not amazing.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012