Hardware Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2007/12/03/gigabyte_ma790fx-dq6/1

Four PCI-Express x16 lanes, AM2+ Phenom support and triple, quad phase power management are all key features from the latest Gigabyte DQ6 board built around the AMD 790FX chipset. But... does it make us want to switch back to AMD?

 

looks good.

As an AM2 owner, and stalwart AMD supporter, i'm hoping that these shape up and will provide a good upgrade route for my current rig. I think getting a phenom in the new year then upgrading to one of these is the way forward, however, i'm really not ready to move to AMD/ATI graphics. I want an 8800GT, and unless the nforce 7 series for AMD from nvidia is really crappy, i think its going to be an SLI capable system rather than crossfireX.

Whatever happened to the glory days of AMD/Nvidia working together? In my opinion, thats where the money is at, given Nvidias dominance of the graphics market, and if AMD want us AM2 owners to stay with AMD processors, a real nvidia friendly SLI solution needs to appear quicksmart, or we'll all be buying Core2 Quads and going blue.

Spider looks appealing, and two HD3870s together sounds fun, but gonna be expensive just to beat a single 8800GT, and as the 790fx doesn't support SLI, its not appearing too highly on my wish-list.

Good through review though, looking forward to how it shapes up against the Nforce chipsets, and finally how Phenom compares against C2Q with the same chipsets.

 

i know you guys are busy, but why even bother to review this board if you aren't going to review the area that sets it apart? not including a quad gpu game bench session, even if it was only one or two games to give us an idea of performance gains, makes no sense to me. i got absolutely nothing out of this review that i didn't already suspect. any chance of a quad gpu redo?

 

OK: 1) There is no CrossFire-X yet - no drivers still until January 2) This board has been out a month already 3) We only just got a Phenom today and people have been asking for an AMD review since Spider was released as we've only done Intel for MONTHS. I could have done yet another X38 board and got accused of being even more Intel fanboish

I respect that you personally didn't get much out of it, but you can barely buy a Phenom, still, so most people will be looking to drop in their current AM2 CPUs for a while and might want to know if there's any performance benefit over the most popular AMD chipset of last year.

Ninja Edit: How many people will actually use four cards? I suspect close to zero - at least I used Gen-2 PCI-E cards

 

As Rich has stated, CrossFireX drivers aren't arriving until (I suspect, the end of) January... does that mean we should wait until then to review the board?

AMD has said "January" for drivers, but I'm expecting it to be closer to the end than the beginning.

 

I would have liked to have seen your performance graphs also include a comparably equipped intel setup. As you say in the first page, this is AMDs first interesting offering in a while. Some comparison figures would be nice.

 

I appreciate that and we're preparing a Spider platform versus Intel equivalent article specifically to address that.

This was just a board review

 

Seems like I don't have to lose my good night's sleep because of these boards. Luckily you had the old allmighty M2N32-SLI there and the difference doesn't seem too radical. In real-world tests more than on the synthetic though...

No upgrade atleast before Phenom. And what's this Gigabyte anyway (j/k, I'm not a fanboy)

 

ah...i did not know that. could have sworn i saw a quick review of crossfire-x posted somewhere, not with quad, but with different gpu's, but i didnt have time to read it. my bad. but i could swear i saw it. so anyway, that is why i didn't get anything out of it and was disappointed when i read everything only to get to the end and not see the crossfire-x results. just more of the same from amd...lots of promises, but havent really delivered anything yet.

 

it almost certainly does if nVidia releases SLI drivers that don't look for an nVidia chipset before enabling SLI ...

Personally 790X looks more interesting atm to me (esp. when SB700 appears) as I don't run multi GPU & the mobos are 1/2 the price going by the MSI.

 

I have a 790X MSI in that I'm doing atm - from the looks it's fantastic value but the feature set is really thin - rear I/O for example. Haven't tested it yet mind

Oh and SLI on non-SLI boards will arrive when the Devil wears ice skates to go to work.

 

or when someone hacks a driver

 

IMO, the layout on this board seem a bit ridiculous. Should you want 2 graphics card, then a raid card (as I am sure many people here might) it would be possible because the 2 spare "x16" slots are limited to only x1. It would have made a lot more sense to have at least one of them x4 surely? It is a step backwards in terms of layout compared to my NF4 board, I can do SLI (theoretically, money limited) and have a x4, x1 and old PCI left over, meaning i can use a x4 RAID card should I want to. Not having that option seems to be a really big mistake, especially when the board is aimed at enthusiasts!

To me, it seems to appeal more to the "ooh, shiny" crowd rather than most enthusiasts who wont be spending money on 4, slower graphics cards. Sorry, I'll shut up now.

 

Not being picky of yet again another excellent review, but do you get 4 or 6 SATA cables?

Your own picture only shows 4, but two are clearly NOT 90 degree ones.

 

Fixed

 

No, those two blue x16s would drop down to x8, and then they would also roll back from Gen-2 to Gen-1 so you'd only get 1/4 of the bandwidth. It's not made for such cards, it merely supports them.

You can either have: x16-x1-x1-x16 or x8-x8-x8-x8.

I can't say there are that many people using such cards mind, although I'll happily be reeducated but from personal experience I can count the amount of people that use one on a single hand.

I do very much agree about the "ooo shiny" or marketing tick box that is, CrossFire-X, however those sorts of people looking to spend money on FOUR cards will also probably have invested in a watercooling solution to match it and get the absolute most out of it.

 

Hmm, unless Asus comes up with anything better than this or a board with a better layout this looks interesting. Asus has always been my favourite motherboard manufacturer, but their support and driver side of the website is slow as hell. I chose Gigabyte for the last build i made for some family and it looks like I may do that again. I haven't had an AMD system since thier revered K6-2 went out of mainstream. Ah, those were days. I have been wanting an AMD system ever since. I so hope that it matures right, but the DS5 looks more like my wallet size. Heck, even if i wanted SLI it would not get 2x GPU's due to cost and the price of running them too.

 

the important bit is encrypted by nVidia now which is why you haven't seen a hacked driver for 8xxx series.