5 - Meet the A790GXM-A mainboard (2)
Overall heat is really not bad, you can actually touch the heatsink blocks with your fingers as the chipset does not get very warm. Also, spot the 8-pin power connector, we got power for the latest and fastest Phenom processors for sure. And you are in luck, these processors just went down in price.
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 (tested by ECS) 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.
Under the black heatsink we spot the new SB750 chip. It actually 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.
Thoughy not noted on the box, this mainboiard 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. Though it's fake-raid (CPU based). Anyway, spot the micro-switches, I just love them. Very easy if you quickly need to reset or power on the mainboard. This kind of detail I like to see in a mainboard.
Outer right view of the mainboard, here we see additional USB ports, close to the SB750 chip of course which manages them.
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 three USB headers. The boards headers are clearly marked, labeled, and color coded.
Okay, you guys ready for some tests ?
