so today I'm going to be unboxing a new product from Gigabyte now I've done a
lot of Intel motherboards over the past few months uh lot of p55 boards a lot of
x58 boards but now I'm starting to look at a few more am3 boards so this is a
790 fxa ud5 so this is their premium am3
motherboard it comes with all of their highest end features including the
three-year warranty etc etc as well as their 333 onboard acceleration so that's
usb3 3.0 what is this I think it's like power
* 3 so it means that all of the USB ports have three times the available
power so if you're using a hub or something like that it takes a lot more
High draw devices in order to overpower the port and then it also has SATA 3.0
oh yeah here it is they have it listed not once but twice on the front Okay so
this also has a bunch of other high-end features it has Ultra durable 3
including the 2 oz copper PCB it has support for three-way Crossfire graphics
DDR3 1866 Plus 8 plus2 phase power
design duby home theater okay it doesn't come in a
high-end box so I can't like show you the window but since we're going to open
the box anyway I guess it's kind of a moot point there's a pink Square here
which is very interesting maybe not
interesting camera person has a bit of a beused look on on yeah okay I'll just
move along moving right along okay here's our Dolby Home Theater sticker
let's get down to what is all included we have one IDE cable and four SATA
cables two of which are straight and two of which are right angle cables then we
have an IO Shield which is colorcoded including I'll show you what the color
coding means after then we have a Gigabyte sticker it is powered by
Gigabyte then we have the users manual
as well as the driver and utility DVD don't use the stuff on that DVD download
the latest from the Gigabyte website then you have a multilingual
installation guide book showing you how to install a motherboard although odds
are pretty good if you don't have someone to teach you and you've never done it before you're not buying a
standalone motherboard all right let's get this board out of here and get this
show on the road so let's just yeah
there we go okay so it's got a little piece of tape sealing it at the back and
you can see under there we've got a a black am3 back plate which is the same
as an am2 or am2 plus back plate because they all use the same Four Hole mounting
configuration okay so let's start with the three times
uh VGA thing here okay so you've got two
PCI Express 16x slots and this bottom one is a PCI Express 8X slot you can
tell because I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see this on the camera but the metal contacts only go up
to about here in the slot so even though it's a physical 16x slot it's only 8X
but because it's PCI Express 2.0 it doesn't really matter that it's 8X
you're not going to see an impact on performance next down here we have a
couple of USB 2.0 headers you can see that all over this board we have oh no
that's not really true okay I'm not going to say that okay on the
side we have six SATA 2 ports as well as
two SATA 3 6 gbit per second ports so
that's pretty cool we have an IDE connector and a floppy connector for
some reason and then in very unusual positions we have I'm sorry I'm turning
this on you we have a power and a reset onboard switch way up here I'm not
really sure why those are there cuz normally you'd find them down the bottom of the board but there they are we have
a 24 pin power connector up at the top right and then the other power connector
I'm going to shift your attention over here is up at the top left in its ideal position there's your eight pin okay
here is the am3 socket supporting only am3 CPUs and then we've got support for
four sticks of dual Channel DDR3 memory unlike most Intel boards most AMD boards
actually put the uh each kit in the color-coded slots which are right next
to each other whereas normally on an Intel board you'd find them uh in slots
one and three for optimal dual channel
uh configuration okay so then we have a pretty high-end looking sort of heatpipe
cooler for the South Bridge North Bridge and uh vrms okay I think that covers
most oh this is oh this is this is really cool actually look it's like a
it's like a missile launch button it's got like a clear cover over it and this
is your clear Simo switch which is conveniently located somewhere where
you'll actually be able to reach it because like the power and reset so
often they're located down here by the time you install two graphics cards I
mean you can't even reach it so this is really convenient I like that then on
the back of the motherboard and I'm going to hold up the io Shield so that you can get some context for this we
have two PS2 ports two digital audio ports then we
have okay we have four Plain Jane USB
ports and those are these two yellow ones right here and these two black ones
right here those are just USB 2.0 then we have two USB SATA 2 ESAT combo ports
and those are these two yellow ones here and then we have two USB 3.0 ports okay
so that's the USB configuration on the back these standards are all
intercompatibility
GA 790 fxt a ud5