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The GIGABYTE GA-790FXTA-UD5 is based upon AMD’s 790FX chipset, their latest high-performance motherboard chipset. AMD has relied on the 790FX chipset since November of 2007 as part of their Spider platform. The 790FX supports HyperTransport 3.0, ATI CrossfireX, AMD OverDrive, Extreme overclocking and is paired with the SB750 Southbridge.  logo  ATI CrossfireX logo  EUP logo  Dolby Home Theater logo One new feature to motherboards is USB 3.0. This technology offers 10x the bandwidth to USB 3.0 devices than the last generation USB 2.0 that has been around since 2000 in the computer industry. The new mode is called SuperSpeed offering 4.8Gigabits/second of bandwidth compared to 480Megabits on the USB 2.0 standard. The power provided to a USB device is 900 mA which is a huge increase over USB 2.0 which had a maximum power spec of 500 mA. The GIGABYTE board uses the NEC USB 3.0 controller and also offers up to 2700mA of power to devices 3x that of a standard USB 3.0 connector. SATA3 or SATA 6Gigabits/second is the third generation of SATA protocol. This doubles the transfer speed of the SATA interface to 6 Gigabits/second versus the SATA 2 interface which did a maximum of 3 Gigabits/second. The increased speed is useful for SSDs but not so much for the SATA HDD as the SSD drive has high sustained transfer rates due to the lack of hard drive platters. On a normal drive the difference is not as profound as the standard HDD hardly saturates the SATA 2 bus. GIGABYTE uses a Marvell SE9128 chip to bring support for SATA 3. ATI’s CrossfireX technology is their brand of multi-GPU solution. Most motherboards on the market with two or more PCI Express slots support this technology. Up to three ATI cards can be installed on this system or even two HD 5970s in Quad-CrossfireX mode for the ultimate in gaming performance out of a system. The AMD 790FX chipset supports the latest AM3 CPUs using the AM3 socket for the CPU interface. This means that the board cannot support AM2+ CPUs which don’t have the necessary memory controller onboard to support DDR3 memory anyway. GIGABYTE says their motherboard has an advanced 8+2 Phase power design with 8 phases for the board and two further phases for the memory and Northbridge. The 790FXTA-UD5 is designed with Ultra Durable 3 features including 2oz copper PCB on both the Power and Ground layers, Japanese Solid Capacitors Lower RDS (on) MOSFETs, and Ferrite Core Chokes. The 2oz of copper improves signal quality and lowers EMI (Electromagnetic Interference), providing better system stability and allowing higher overclocking on their boards. The 790FXTA-UD5 board is the first I’ve seen with their Easy Energy Saver technology. The EES replaces the Dynamic Energy Saver technology to dynamically adjust CPU power based on the workload. Most people using Word don’t need a lot of CPU cycles and this can save a lot of energy in the long run where the CPU isn’t being stressed. EasyTune6 is GIGABYTE’s overclocking and hardware monitoring tool. The eSATA/USB combo port supports either external SATA or USB devices. Contents:
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