Here come AMD with their new integrated graphics chipset with the AMD 790GX, came from the new version of the AMD’s line of motherboards that support the new Phenom and the previous AMD Athlon 64. With the thing going back to the 790FX and the 770X chipset series that we have been reviewed, with the Gigabyte GA-790FX, is a bit of a disappointment with the spaces that the board provides, with only single slot sized graphics card sapce avaliable in each slot, you are much pretty limited to four-way crossfire with HD3850.
But with the help of an integrated graphics, it can be a great alternative when it comes on finally choosing the right discreet grpahics to use. With the gigabyte 790GP-DS4H, has the integrated ATI radeon HD3300 chipset inside, which can in turn decode any high definition applications, very good for an overall PC build without the need of a external graphics. But good enough to play most mainstream games, not really the high demanding games like Crysis or any other games in very high detail and the AAF up to the max. While you add up a 3870 or a 3870 X2 with hybrid crossfire, you are talking about great boost with the performance, and also the benefit of using another graphics chip to do some of the work.
With the board layout is a trademark silent pipe cooling form Gigabyte, using all of the world supply of copper to make the Aussies happy with their mining jobs. With the upcoming specs of the support of all Phenom Chips with hyper threading memory with 4000MHz help with the transfer of memory and increase load times, in games and even the OS. With two PCI express 2.0 for crossfire and hybrid crossfire, Six SATA ports which if you use 3870 X2’s on it you can lose about the two or the four SATA ports (four because the fan theory), and also the real problem with the really top PCIex X1 port near the heat sink, which in turn when running the board on its rounds really heat up the sound card or a network card, and the usual 12 phase PMW’s go all the way down to the side of the CPU and the memory slots are conveniently on the top of the board with the complete access of all memory with no hassle with the removal of the video card.
With the performance with the decoding on video and audio (this type of board targets on the home/ gaming hybrid player) with the HD decoding is much faster and takes much less time that the Intel’s integrated chips, while you cannot beat a full upgrade to the video card, but the difference with the AMD one with any other is the unlockable and the full tweaking of the integrated graphics, with a good twitch on the frequency and add up the juice, you can get 5 to 10 fps on most games. To the more relevant, this board comes a good grade to me, If finding a semi gaming and home theatre system in one board stop searching and this is the one.