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Foxconn A7DA-S & MSI DKA790GX Platinum Review
[Abstract]
Introduction When AMD launched its 780G chipset early this year, it was hailed as one of the best integrated chipsets in the market. Intel was yet to deliver on its newer 4-series chipset then ...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Test Setup
With the 790GX's positioning in the performance mainstream segment, we decided to find out to what extent does the new chipset fulfill its performance promise. To that end, we took the results of our last AMD 790FX motherboard roundup and compared them against these two 790GX boards. A similar test configuration was applied to all the boards in the benchmark comparison, where possible. The MSI DKA790GX Platinum had some compatibility issues with our Kingston HyperX memory modules and we had to use Aeneon's DDR2-1066 running at DDR2-800 instead.
The MSI DKA790GX Platinum was updated to the A7550AMS BIOS while the Foxconn A7DA-S was updated to 81BF1P03 BIOS for the benchmarking.
Test Configuration
- AMD Phenom 9900 (2.60GHz, 2GHz HT Bus, 2GHz NB bus)
- 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 4-4-12 CAS 4.0
- 2 x 1GB Aeneon DDR2-1066 @800MHz and 5-5-12 CAS 5.0 for the MSI DKA790GX Platinum.
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA HDD (one single NTFS partition)
- MSI GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB - with ForceWare 169.21 drivers
- AMD Processor Driver 1.3.2.0058
- Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)
Benchmarks
The following benchmarks were used to evaluate the performance of the motherboards highlighted here:-
- BAPco SYSmark 2007 Preview
- Futuremark PCMark05
- SPECviewperf 9.0
- AquaMark3
Since the AMD 790GX chipset comes with integrated graphics, we also ran some GPU tests in the form of the following gaming benchmarks, comparing its performance with the Radeon HD 3200 found on the 780G:-
Quake 4 (ver 1.3)
Unreal Tournament 3 (ver 1.1)
Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
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