by Doors4ever
04/20/2009 | 06:54 PM
We started a series of Socket AM3 mainboard reviews with Asus M4A78T-E based on AMD 790GX chipset. One day we would find a worthy rival for it in Gigabyte’s camp, but this time things are a little different. A number of complications that had been haunting the Asus board right from the beginning made us start looking for an alternative testbed ASAP. We had to find out if the discovered issues were the fault of Asus engineers or were typical of any Socket AM3 mainboards. We managed to get our hands on Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P based on AMD 790X chipset. In fact, we were testing the two mainboards almost simultaneously, replacing them on the testbed, in order to compare the results side by side. I have to say that it is a very interesting approach to testing, as it answers a lot of questions that inevitably pop up when you study a new platform. I will absolutely do it next time again, and today we would like to offer you a review of the Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard.
Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard is shipped in a small vertical box. It lists the supported functions, technologies and peculiarities of the product.
The mainboard is wrapped in a plastic bag and all bundled accessories are spread out above it. They are:
Poorly designed mainboards with evident layout issues have become very rare these days. And this is definitely not about Gigabyte mainboards, which are designed by a team of outstanding engineers. Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P is also no exception to this rule – it uses classical components layout, has very thought-through design; even the smallest details indicate that the developers care about the user experience a lot.
A large “Ultra Durable” inscription on one of the heatsinks reminds us of a highest quality components used for the eight-phase processor voltage regulator as well as the rest of the PCB. All power connectors are in very convenient spots, there is enough room around the processor socket even for large cooling solutions, the four DIMM slots can accommodate up to 16GB of DDR3 SDRAM.
The heatsinks on chipset North Bridges often boast very unique shapes and sophisticated internal design. This time, they had to invent a very uniquely-shaped heatsink because it was close to the PCI Express slots.
The heatpipe connects it with the heatsink over processor voltage regulator transistors. Moreover, the processor voltage regulator circuitry is pretty complex, too.
Even a small heatsink over the AMD SB750 South Bridge doesn’t look common:
There are two PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots in the lower part of the PCB. The space between them is made larger than usual, so they can fit two graphics cards even with very large coolers. If you use only one graphics card, like the majority of users out there, you should install it into the first teal slot, so that it could work at full speed. The slots share 16 PCI Express lanes, so two graphics cards will work as x8-x8. Therefore, the second orange connector only has half of the pins in it. Moreover, Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P has three PCI Express x1 and two PCI slots.
AMD SB750 South Bridge provides support for one PATA connector that supports up to two ATA-133/100/66/33 devices and six Serial ATA connectors. You can also build RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 and JBOD arrays with SATA HDDs. Besides, there is an additional Gigabyte SATA2 controller delivering another two SATA ports (purple color) supporting RAID 0, RAID 1 and JBOD.
Gigabyte pays special attention to the documentation that comes with their boards. There is a lot of useful info in the included user’s manual; the multi-lingual booklet with brief assembly and installation instructions provides the necessary basics. The color-coded connectors and explanatory marks on the PCB and inside some connectors also facilitate the assembly process.
There are the following connectors on the back of Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard:
The components layout of Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P from the manual will show you once again how well thought-through the PCB design is:
After another close look at the layout, we find only a few frustrating issues. Namely, the board has no connectors for the fan on the case rare panel. I wonder what is behind this “popular” issue. For example, the recently tested Asus P6T mainboard also didn’t have a connector for this type of fan. The next drawback is the absence of LEDs. It is really nice that the board doesn’t blink like a Christmas tree with a bunch of bright multi-color LEDs that cannot be turned off; however, I think they could have left at least one indicating if the board received power. Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P is not the only board like that. We have already seen the same on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. But why would anyone repeat someone else’s drawbacks?
At this time I would like to take the opportunity and express my sincere discontent with the content quality on the official AMD web-sites. Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard is based on AMD 790X chipset. Of course, the first natural intention is to go to the developer site to learn more about the peculiarities of this core logic set and differences from the other chipsets. I am afraid you may be unable to do so. You can easily find the page devoted to 7th series chipsets. You may even find the link to the specifications page. However, you won’t find any detailed technical description of features there: at best there will be some general info that should rather be part of a marketing booklet and not a serious web-site. For example, they used exact same wording for the description of AMD 790FX and AMD 790X chipsets: does it mean the chipsets are exactly the same? No, they differ by the number of PCI Express lanes; however, you will not find this information in the “marketing” technical specs.
This sad situation takes place not only for AMD chipsets, but also graphics cards. Only processors seem to have adequate technical info about them available. Note that they also offer you to rate their page in terms of design, content and usability (the corresponding link is at the bottom of every page of the AMD web-site). You may also leave your comments and answer a few questions there. Please, do not skip the opportunity to do so. If you didn’t find the information you were looking for, let them know. Hopefully, AMD webmasters will take your comments into account and will improve the quality of info on their site. And at this time, let’s take a closer look at the Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P specifications that can be easily located on Gigabyte’s official web-site:
Now that we have checked out almost impeccable PCB design of the Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard and studied the impressive list of supported features, any computer enthusiast will be more than pleased. The BIOS Setup check promised to be quite pleasant as well, because we all know how thoughtful Gigabyte is when it comes to making their mainboard BIOS more illustrative, convenient to use and rich in features and functions. Unfortunately, we faced a few upsetting issues that may somewhat spoil the fun from working with Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P.
Gigabyte keeps hiding some BIOS Setup settings behind “Ctrl-F1” key combination. Don’t forget to press them on launching the BIOS Setup if you want to get full access to the available parameters.
The first section we see is “MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.)” holding almost all settings that may be of interest to computer enthusiasts and overclockers. At first glance, the page looks quite common for Gigabyte: easy to work with and informative.
It reports the current CPU frequency that will change when you change the clock frequency multiplier or clock generator frequency. You can also easily check the integrated North Bridge frequency, which is set with multipliers of its own.
As for the HyperTransport bus frequency, which also increases together with the clock speed, it is set as is, without any multipliers:
It doesn’t matter what format is used to set the HyperTransport bus frequency. The problem is that the reported value remains fixed and doesn’t change as the clock speed increases. You will have to calculate the actual HyperTransport bus frequency manually, to make sure that it remains close to the nominal value during overclocking. Quite an inconvenience.
Let’s move on. Numerous parameters dealing with the memory subsystem configuration are all on a separate page called “DRAM Configuration”:
I think it doesn’t make sense to duplicate settings for clock and memory frequency, but it is not a big deal anyway. However, it is great to see not only the timings that the mainboard sets automatically, but also those written in the modules SPD. But what will happen if we decide to change some memory timings manually?
Once you switch “DDR3 Timing Items” parameter to “Manual”, all “Auto” settings will disappear right away. Now you will see the actual values for all of them, and as you can notice they differ dramatically from those used in Auto mode as well as from those written in the modules SPD. As a result, even if you only wanted to adjust one timing value, you will be forced to set absolutely all memory timings manually. A pretty big setback.
Let’s get back to the main “Mainboard Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.)” page and try adjusting the voltages manually. Just like with the timings, all “Auto” settings are gone, but this time they get replaced with “Normal”. And what are these “Normal” settings?
However, when we got down to business, there was a pleasant surprise waiting for us. When we tried to change the voltages, there appeared informational parameters reporting the current values for the settings in question. If the numbers were too high, they were highlighted with a warning color.
The total voltage sent to the CPU can also be calculated from the nominal voltage that we know. Unfortunately, we know nothing about setting of the “CPU NB VID Control” parameter. And there is no option for raising the HyperTransport bus voltage, either. It’s a pity.
Just in case, let me check out the “PC Health Status” page. However, the functionality of this section has never been among Gigabyte mainboards’ strengths. The main distinguishing feature of this section is probably the ability to control the rotation speed of three-pin processor fan, which seems to be gone by almost all contemporary mainboards except the ones from Gigabyte.
However, Gigabyte has a great utility for Windows called EasyTune6, which we have already praised quite a few times in our previous reviews. This program reports the info about the processor and system board, may read information from the memory modules SPD, may help overclock the processor, memory or even graphics card. You can use CIA2 dynamic overclocking (CPU Intelligent Accelerator), set up fan rotation speed control for the CPU cooler, check the monitoring readings. However, all these functions may be also implemented through the mainboard BIOS or with other utilities. The unique feature of EasyTune6 is its ability to report all voltage settings that the mainboard can control in the “Tuner” section on the “Advanced” page.
Everything we have just said I absolutely true, but only if you use EasyTune6 on any mainboard other than Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P. It turned out that in this case the utility reports the same two voltages (CPU and memory) that we can see in the BIOS Setup or with any other utilities, such as CPUID Hardware Monitor, for instance. Unfortunately, we had to uninstall the EasyTune6 program, which was of no particular value anymore. What a disappointment!
Gigabyte mainboards are well-known for very convenient settings saving algorithm in the BIOS. Just press F11 in the main menu in order to save one of eight possible BIOS settings profiles. Each profile can have its own name reminding you of the contents. Profiles can be saved not only in the memory but also on external media. You should absolutely take advantage of the latter feature, because you will lose all saved profiles after reflashing the BIOS or switching to a reserve chip.
By pressing F12 you get access to a similar menu where you can select one of the presaved profiles. By the way, the board saves the current settings configuration automatically after each successful POST pass. This allows you to return to the last known working configuration, even if you haven't saved it yourself.
Everything seems to be great, however, Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard prepared another unexpected surprise for us: the loaded profile usually applied only on second try. No wonder that the board wouldn’t start on the first attempt, if we were trying to make it work with the CPU overclocked way too high. But the board required a second reboot even when we loaded a profile with nominal settings. Not too convenient.
As for the built-in QFlash utility for BIOS updating that can be launched by pressing F8 from the main menu or “End” during mainboard booting, we have already mentioned all its advantages multiple times in our reviews. It is great that we can forget about boot-up floppies or flash-drives: the built-in utility will save the current BIOS version and update the BIOS with a new one from any available medium.
However, the functionality of the Gigabyte QFlash utility is pretty limited and hasn’t been refreshed for quite some time. Unlike a similar program integrated into the BIOS of Asus boards, we don’t see any information about the current BIOS version as well as about the version we are going to reflash. We don’t know which microchip we are using to save the new BIOS version in, therefore if the board decides that the primary chip is damaged, we may end up with the old BIOS version and lose all the settings we have worked on all this time. Besides, Gigabyte mainboards as always do not report anything about resetting all parameters or switching to the reserve BIOS chip, so you will not learn about it right away: the board doesn’t report the current processor frequency on system boot-up.
And you will be wrong to believe that DDR3 SDRAM from the screenshot above is working at 1066MHz, according to Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard. In fact, the current memory multiplier in the nominal CPU operational mode would have produced 1066MHz memory frequency. But in reality, the CPU is overclocked and the actual memory frequency is much higher.
For some reason Clear CMOS switch resets the date and time in the mainboard BIOS.
We seem to have found quite a few issues, don’t you think so? Luckily, most of them are not critical and will not cause any problems for Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P in nominal as well as overclocked modes. They may simply cause you some inconveniences, and that’s about it. We ran all tests with the BIOS version F2b, however, when we updated it to F3 nothing changed.
All practical tests and experiments were performed on the following test platform:
We used Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 x86 operating system and ATI Catalyst 9.2 graphics card driver.
The system worked in nominal mode perfectly fine. We can compare the performance of our platform with a similar one, featuring the recently tested Asus M4A78T-E. The mainboards are based on different chipsets, which are, nevertheless, very similar in functionality: Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P is based on AMD 790X, while Asus M4A78T-E is based on AMD 790GX. Other than that both testbeds were configured absolutely identically. All BIOS settings were at defaults and hence were set by the boards themselves. The only exception was the AMD Cool’n’Quiet power-saving technology that for some reason was disabled on the Asus board, so we had to turn it on manually.
As we have expected, both systems show very similar results: one board is a little faster in some tests, another board – in other tests. Small differences are absolutely natural. The only more or less noticeable difference is in copy speed measured by Everest program, where Gigabyte mainboard falls far behind. Both mainboards set DDR3 memory at 1333MHz frequency with 7-7-7-20-1T timings by default. Asus board is probably setting more aggressive secondary timings, which delivers such an impressive advantage. However, this advantage doesn’t really show in the benchmarks we use for our test session, so you shouldn’t be too concerned about the significance of Gigabyte’s loss. It is just another proof of a well-known fact that the results of synthetic benchmarks do not always represent the actual state of things.
We overclocked our AMD Phenom II X4 810 processor on Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard without any problems. There were minor complications caused by the imperfections of the board itself. The CPU passed preliminary LinX tests at 250MHz frequency without raising the Vcore past 1.3V. It is way better than the 230MHz result achieved on Asus M4A78T-E. And luckily we had no reason to be concerned about the health of our processor, which we thought might have lost some of its overclocking potential because of extremely high voltage it received from Asus board during our previous test session. Tests proved that our AMD Phenom II X4 810 processor could overclock to 3.7GHz.
The CPU clock frequency multiplier and core voltage will lower when there is no workload due to AMD Cool’n’Quiet technology.
Overclocking was performed on Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P with the following BIOS settings:
As we have mentioned before, overclocking on Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P may not be as smooth as you expect it to be. Note that according to the BIOS, HyperTransport bus frequency is set at 1.4GHz, while in reality it is 1995MHz (taking into account clock frequency increased to 285MHz and HyperTRansport bus multiplier – to x7).
It is not very interesting to compare the systems performance when the CPU is overclocked to 3.7GHz on Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P and only to 3.25GHz on Asus M4A78T-E. The results of this comparison are evident. But it is not our fault that we couldn’t get Asus board to work stably at 285MHz clock generator frequency because of a number of issues we discovered, so we had to go down to 250MHz.
It was pretty predictable that Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P would outperform the competitor. The notorious copy speed Everest test was the only exception: Asus mainboard was a very confident leader here. Although, this victory didn't really pay off. To be fair, we have to say that as soon as (if) all the issues we discovered with Asus M4A78T-E are eliminated and resolved and it reaches stability at 3.7GHz CPU frequency, it will perform just as fast as Gigabyte solution we discussed today.
Power consumption measurements have become a traditional part of our mainboard reviews. We used Extech Power Analyzer 380803 device. This device is connected before the system PSU, i.e. it measures the power consumption of the entire system without the monitor, including the power losses that occur in the PSU itself. When we took the power readings in idle mode, the system was completely idle: there were even no requests sent to the hard drive at that time. We used Fritz Chess Benchmark to load the CPU and FurMark utility to load the graphics subsystem. We recorded the maximum readings.
No wonder that during CPU overclocking the system based on Gigabyte mainboard consumes considerably more power than the system based on Asus. We had to push the voltages a little higher in order to ensure stability during higher CPU overclocking. However, even in nominal mode the system based on Asus consumes less power and only under higher load the difference decreases and then disappears completely.
Despite numerous critical comments we made about Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard, there is nothing serious that you should be concerned about. I can even say that the board barely has any drawbacks at all: it is very well built, has excellent PCB layout and technical characteristics, works impeccably in nominal mode and overclocks CPUs very well. If we add here a number of Gigabyte’s brand name functions and technologies, the board will be almost ideal. Unfortunately, the word “almost” is still there. There are no serious drawbacks, but numerous little issues do spoil the remarkable impression from this solution a little bit.
Let’s sum up all the little things we have pointed out throughout the review of Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P:
Frankly speaking, I feel awkward listing small things like that. I am sure you will agree that these are not real drawbacks. These are small issues and imperfections that can cause minor inconveniences, but will not develop into anything serious. Of course, but why are there so many of them? I could probably compare this mainboard to a chair: it is big, beautiful, reliable, and pretty comfortable at first glance, but it is not sanded and lacquered, so the splinters…
Numerous “splinters” like that, which we have encountered during our work with Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard do not let us award it with a winning title. We would rank it as B+ (with A high), or A- at best. And if we disregarded all small issues we found, the board would be a real beauty.