AMD, has in turn, made great products for the past 3 years in the 2nd millennium, while now, they appear to be struggling with the rival in the CPU community, Intel with their new brand of Intel core 2 duo’s in the market, ditching their old Pentium products, for the appeal of energy saving Intel M processors, but with out sacrificing performance. With the appeal to the green people of your computing community and the smaller architecture size, gives an edge to Intel.
AMD 790FX
Well the disappointment with the CPU’s ended; the plus side of AMD is the start with AMD 7 series. Their product lines are the 770’s for media users on the tree and the top are the 790X and the 790FX boards. Their physical differences are the amount of PCIe the different boards has, the 770 are tend to have one PCIe, for its media purposes, then the 790X for two PCIe’s, to rival it with the NVIDIA 6 series true SLI capabilities, and that fails, there is the 790FX with the total PCIe count of about four, or three PCIe (it depends on the manufacturer, we know that ASROCK only uses three PCIe to their 790FX).
While there are some issues with the SATA controllers that has arisen to the board, with others to add, with stability issues with the BIOS and so on. The good things that can appeal to others, is the improved memory transfer with the 7 series especially the 790FX, with a 2Gbs DDR2 with 3000MHz with the help of the hyper transport 3.0 saw the test with the SISoftsandra on the top of the category with the Intel based boards left in the dark.
In the 770 and the 790 have the same SATA connector count of about four and you cannot use RAID 5 on the hard-drive, because of the old south-bridge SB600 used in the former ATI chipsets in 2006, with the lack of SATA connectors and, to include no Gigabit internet connector, with the SB600 history of not including the Ethernet controller, for the sake of performance you opt to buy a separated PCI Ethernet connector. Other than that, it has three or two peripheral PCI connectors, dual DIMM memory connectors with a limit of 8Gbs, with ten USB connectors and eight audio connectors with HD or AC97.
Performance, Over-clocking and efficiency
AMD’s performance count is a mixed result, great on Photoshop utilization, with the help of AMD Phemon’s independent cores and the transfer rate, and a disappointment on security and gaming, where they can only use one of the cores. In the over-clocking AMD let suers use their overdrive utility to take their advantage of lowering latency and up the antsy on the core frequency only limits you to less than in our system about 3.2Ghz on the Phemon 9850, because of its low stock frequency of 2.5Ghz. Lastly efficiency is in the middle with most other boards with Intel, with their energy efficiency turned off!
Conclusion
AMD is very hard to really dig into, with the limitations on peripherals and a low bandwidth of only 8Gbs compared to Nforce5 series that have 32gbs. With great memory transfer thought the board is the strong point for the board and also three or four crossfire enabled PCIe slots for graphic grunt. With the 790FX getting tired of losing on the raw performance tests, in the point, AMD is one step forward and then two steps back.