P
ardon us, but crowing that your
integrated graphics chip is better than
your competitor’s integrated graphics
chip is a bit like bragging that your D is better
than your friend’s D-.
As sad as that is, it’s the tack AMD is tak-
ing with its 790GX chipset, which Gigabyte’s
MA790GP-DS4H mobo is based on. While
the chipset features DirectX 10 support and
indeed might be faster than other integrated
graphics solutions, it’s still slower than the
ancient GeForce 7600 GS we compared it to.
The 790GX does support a hybrid mode,
which allows you to pair an equally weak
Radeon HD 3400-class GPU with the board.
By adding the subpar performance of the
Radeon to the integrated graphics, you im-mediately realize you should have purchased
a better videocard. If that were the only
story, we’d already be done with the 790GX.
What’s interesting is that AMD’s latest
chipset scales from dirt-poor integrated, to
illogical hybrid support, all the way up to full
CrossFire support. The MA790GP-DS4H takes
full advantage of the CrossFire slots and lets
you run two GPUs at full x16 PCI-E 2.0 data
rates. However, Gigabyte makes a faux pas
by pointing the SATA ports straight up. If you
were to run two double-wide GPUs in the
board, several SATA ports would be cut off.
The real news concerning the Gigabyte
board is the inclusion of AMD’s new SB750
south-bridge chip, which adds RAID 5, ad-
ditional SATA ports, and the ability to directlyoverclock the CPU further than you could
before, theoretically. Our Phenom overclocks
have been good but not stellar, and we didn’t
seem to get much further with the new
SB750, so your mileage may vary.
In our benchmarks, the board’s perfor-
mance was all over the map, with hard drive
scores particularly low. Only aft er installing a
patch provided to the media (with the warn-
ing that it could result in data loss) did we see
performance actually match that of boards
based on the 790FX chipset. We imagine
that fi nal drivers will include the patch, but
it’s obvious to us that the MA 790GP-DS4H’s
drivers weren’t fully baked for the release, so
color us unimpressed. – G O R D O N M A H U N GGigabyte MA 790GP-DS4H
Integrated graphics that don’t suck (much)
This 790GX board scales from
integrated to CrossFire.VERDICT$145, http://www.gigabyte.com.tw6
Scales from integrated
to full-tilt CrossFire
support.Poor SATA port place-
ment; BIOS disables
USB keyboard support
by default.CODEX LEICESTERGIGABYTE MA 790GP-DS4HDA VINCI CODEIN THE LAB^
REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE88 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC|DEC 08 |www.maximumpc.com
Gigabyte MA790GP-DS4H Asus M3A32-MVP
PCMark GPU 11,663 12,610
3DMark06 Overall 11,571 12,020
HD Tach Average 59.3 77.4
Valve Particle test 66 71
UT3 standard (fps) 76 83
FEAR Max/min (fps) 173 213
Quake 4 low (fps) 166 152.7Best scores are bolded. Our test bed consists of a Phenom 9950BE, 2GB of DDR2/800 RAM, a 150GB WD Raptor hard drive, a GeForce 8800 GTX, and Windows XP SP2.BENCHMARKS