6 - Photo gallery - The Mainboard (2)
Both northbridge, southbridge and mosfets are cooled passively with a copper heatsink, making the product completely silent. Overall heat is really not bad, you can actually touch the copper blocks with you fingers. Also, the 8-pin power connector, placed perfectly fine.
On the topic of power distribution. A good number of 780G boards had an issue with high-TDP Phenoms. Phenom X4 9850 and 9950 carry respective TDPs of 125 and 140Wtoo much power for some mid-range motherboards to handle. AMD made sure that the 790GX mainboards supports the high-wattage processors and overclocking of these.
The board supports four 240-pin unbuffered non-ECC DDR II SDRAM DIMM sockets and up to 8GB of memory can be installed on the board. For AM2 processors, DDR2-533/667/800 is supported. For Phenom AM2+, memory supported is DDR2-667/800/1066. It also support Asynchronous clocking mode between FSB and DIMM.
The new SB750 supports 12 USB connectors compliant with a USB2.0 from embedded USB controller (4 connectors at rear panel). The SB750 also supports a P-ATA IDE for One IDE port (up to 2 IDE devices) with UDMA-33, ATA-66/100/133 support from an embedded IDE controller. It also support S-ATA RAID with Six S-ATA II ports with up to 300MB/s from chipset with RAID 0,1,0+1,5 support.
The board is outfitted with two PCI Express x1 slots, two x16 PEG slot (with x8 connections) and two standard PCI slots. All of its main connectors and headers are placed around the edges of the board, save for a band of four USB headers. The boards headers are clearly marked, labeled, and color coded.
