Tech Reaction

The way you will see me do reviews here will differ from the norm. You will never see me do a review at stock speeds…..There are plenty of review sites that already do that……What I do is start where they leave off, the overclocked and extreme overclocked results……Reviews for Overclockers by Overclockers.

If a product line has a prior known weakness I will exploit it, in this case Gigabyte’s AMD boards have not been to ram clocking friendly so I decided to put it to the test.

Before we get to the review part I would like to make some comments about Gigabyte concerning AMD boards.

When I arrived back in the OC scene my impression was that Gigabyte AMD platforms had a bad rap. Bucking the odds I picked up a one of they’re 790GX  boards  for a  firsthand experience as I am not one to follow the majority and have to see things from my own perspective. The board was far from the picture that had been painted. Granted it had its issues as do many other motherboards but still was/is a solid performer. It was my return to AMD and the 790GX  Gigabyte board that got me alot of recognition that I have recently received. I would also like to state that I do not work for gigabyte however on more recent boards I have been working with them very closely on the bios’s. With that said enter the MA790FX-UD5P.

System setup

Gigabyte MA790FX-UD5P

AMD ES CPU

Cellshock  2×1gig  SPD  rated 4-4-4-12 @ 1000

2x 4850’s crossfire/ 2x 4890’s crossfire

PC P&C 750w

Picture Show

The E sata bracket bundled is preety nifty and I thought it worthy of mentioning.

Air Stability/Benchmark Testing  and ram clocking all tossed together.

I decided to throw a little cold at it to see how it held up for some 3d benching

2 x 4850’s crossfire                2 x 4890’s crossfire

Final thoughts

This board has come along way from the original bios I was working with in very short time. Ram clocking is great, layout is great. There are no longer cold boot issues, If you over clock ram to hard it will refuse to boot but a simple reset of bios and going into bios profiles page and loading last known good settings saves you a lot of time. All in all this board gets a big thumbs up and hopefully the 790FXT can follow suit soon……..

Those looking for a rock solid board but not wanting to shift to DDR III should look no further than the MA790FX-UD5P as this is hands down the best DDR II Phenom II board I have used to date. If I had one gripe it would have to be the color scheme as I am more partial to the 790FXT color scheme.