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Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-UD4H Review
[Abstract]
IntroductionThere is sufficient anecdotal evidence and hard numbers to show that AMD is gradually clawing its way back in the CPU stakes. Part of the reason probably has to do with its Phenom I...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Overclocking
With its dual BIOS feature, the Gigabyte board can recover from corrupted BIOS and as we found out firsthand, even from improper overclocked settings too. When we managed to crash the motherboard with overly aggressive settings, the board rebooted with an option for us to recover the previous working BIOS settings. While other motherboards too have their own recovery plans for such cases, Gigabyte's implementation seemed quite well done and user friendly.
The BIOS from Gigabyte was in its usual format, with some of the more important settings from its MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T) listed below:
- Base Frequency (aka FSB) Settings: 200 to 600MHz
- PCIe Frequency: 100 to 200MHz
- VGA Core Clock: 200 to 2000MHz
- Memory Clock Ratio: Auto, 2.00, 2.66, 3.33, 4.00, 5.33
- CPU Core Ratio: 5 to 13
- CPU Voltage Settings: -0.6 to +0.6V
- Memory Voltage Settings: +0.05 to +0.55V (in 0.05V steps)
- SB Voltage Settings: +0.1 to +0.3V (in 0.1V steps)
- NB Voltage Settings: -0.2 to +0.3V (in 0.025V steps)
We reduced the CPU multiplier to its minimum, allowing us to hit 330MHz for the bus speed. |
As for the actual overclocking attempt, the Gigabyte MA790GP-UD4H surprised us by hitting a high of 330MHz for the bus speed. Since we are only concerned with this measure, we naturally lowered the CPU multiplier to its minimum. 330MHz however was the highest that we have seen for an AMD 790GX motherboard, 10MHz more than our previous best.
Test Setup
Since we were testing an AMD 790GX motherboard with DDR2 memory, our previous review of such hardware was quite old so we proceeded to update the results of one of the motherboards from that review, the MSI DKA790GX Platinum. This board and the Gigabyte MA790GP-UD4H were using the following configuration below. Do note that we were unable to set 1T memory timing for both DDR2 boards.
- AMD Phenom II X4 810 (2.6GHz)
- 2 x 1GB Aenon DDR2-1066 (5-5-5-15, 2T for Gigabyte MA790GP-UD4H, 5-7-7-24, 2T for MSI DKA790GX Platinum)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
- ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB - with ForceWare 178.24 drivers
- AMD Southbridge Driver 8.522
- Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)
We also threw in our top dog from our mainstream AM3 AMD790GX roundup, the MSI 790GX-G65 into the mix to see how the DDR3 version of the chipset compared. This configuration was similar to the one listed above, with the sole difference being the use of 2GB of DDR3-1333 at 7-7-7-20 instead of DDR2-1066.
The following benchmarks were used to determine the performance of the AMD 790GX motherboards:
- BAPco SYSmark 2007 (with Patch 4)
- Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
- SPECviewperf 9.0
- AquaMark3
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