Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5 Motherboard Review - The AMD 790FX chip set king of the hill winner@ Magicmc.com Reviews

Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5 Motherboard Review - The AMD 790FX chip set king of the hill winner

Be ready to grab your favorite unlocked Black Edition AMD CPU and have some fun. The modified version of the Phoenix Award BIOS allows you access to all of the AM3 CPU options including C!E, K* cool'n'quiet, and virtualization. RAID and onboard SATA access and initial display adapter are also controlled via the BIOS.

Our test took an AMD Phenom II 810 and ran it up to 3.04GHz with no stability issues.With triple channel memory handling, and 36 PCI lanes to exploit, adding Crossfire X 3X, SATA3 and USB3.0 are given plenty of space to do their jobs simultaneously.

In benchmarking, the Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5 outperformed the ASRock M3A790GXH128 and the MSI 790gx-g65 by leaps and bounds. In 3DMark it soundly defeated all competitors, but it did have some trouble making the grade with wPrime, showing its excellent potential in gaming, but not so great as a data cruncher. Specviewer benching left all takers in the dust, and the new additions made since the Gigabyte MA-790FXT-UD5P showed the upgrade performance increase in a dramatic fashion.

If your chosen CPU is going to be an AMD, and the X58 platform and 790 chipset seems like a viable pairing for it, then the additional SATA3, USB3, and 3-way CrossfireX support will only add icing to the cake. Most other boards that claim king of the hill lack one or more of these features. The Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5 has no such flaw. With plenty of PCI Express lanes to choose from, you can fire up all engines with no slowing in performance, an overall great AMD based motherboard with plenty of new technology features, it is definitely king of the hill.

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