Gigabyte 790FXTA-UD5 Premium AM3 Crossfire DDR3 Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,083 words · ~5 min read
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so today I'm going to be unboxing a new product from Gigabyte now I've done a
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lot of Intel motherboards over the past few months uh lot of p55 boards a lot of
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x58 boards but now I'm starting to look at a few more am3 boards so this is a
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790 fxa ud5 so this is their premium am3
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motherboard it comes with all of their highest end features including the
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three-year warranty etc etc as well as their 333 onboard acceleration so that's
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usb3 3.0 what is this I think it's like power
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* 3 so it means that all of the USB ports have three times the available
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power so if you're using a hub or something like that it takes a lot more
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High draw devices in order to overpower the port and then it also has SATA 3.0
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oh yeah here it is they have it listed not once but twice on the front Okay so
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this also has a bunch of other high-end features it has Ultra durable 3
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including the 2 oz copper PCB it has support for three-way Crossfire graphics
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DDR3 1866 Plus 8 plus2 phase power
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design duby home theater okay it doesn't come in a
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high-end box so I can't like show you the window but since we're going to open
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the box anyway I guess it's kind of a moot point there's a pink Square here
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which is very interesting maybe not
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interesting camera person has a bit of a beused look on on yeah okay I'll just
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move along moving right along okay here's our Dolby Home Theater sticker
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let's get down to what is all included we have one IDE cable and four SATA
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cables two of which are straight and two of which are right angle cables then we
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have an IO Shield which is colorcoded including I'll show you what the color
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coding means after then we have a Gigabyte sticker it is powered by
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Gigabyte then we have the users manual
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as well as the driver and utility DVD don't use the stuff on that DVD download
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the latest from the Gigabyte website then you have a multilingual
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installation guide book showing you how to install a motherboard although odds
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are pretty good if you don't have someone to teach you and you've never done it before you're not buying a
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standalone motherboard all right let's get this board out of here and get this
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show on the road so let's just yeah
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there we go okay so it's got a little piece of tape sealing it at the back and
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you can see under there we've got a a black am3 back plate which is the same
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as an am2 or am2 plus back plate because they all use the same Four Hole mounting
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configuration okay so let's start with the three times
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uh VGA thing here okay so you've got two
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PCI Express 16x slots and this bottom one is a PCI Express 8X slot you can
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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
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to about here in the slot so even though it's a physical 16x slot it's only 8X
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but because it's PCI Express 2.0 it doesn't really matter that it's 8X
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you're not going to see an impact on performance next down here we have a
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couple of USB 2.0 headers you can see that all over this board we have oh no
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that's not really true okay I'm not going to say that okay on the
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side we have six SATA 2 ports as well as
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two SATA 3 6 gbit per second ports so
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that's pretty cool we have an IDE connector and a floppy connector for
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some reason and then in very unusual positions we have I'm sorry I'm turning
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this on you we have a power and a reset onboard switch way up here I'm not
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really sure why those are there cuz normally you'd find them down the bottom of the board but there they are we have
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a 24 pin power connector up at the top right and then the other power connector
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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
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here is the am3 socket supporting only am3 CPUs and then we've got support for
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four sticks of dual Channel DDR3 memory unlike most Intel boards most AMD boards
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actually put the uh each kit in the color-coded slots which are right next
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to each other whereas normally on an Intel board you'd find them uh in slots
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one and three for optimal dual channel
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uh configuration okay so then we have a pretty high-end looking sort of heatpipe
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cooler for the South Bridge North Bridge and uh vrms okay I think that covers
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most oh this is oh this is this is really cool actually look it's like a
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it's like a missile launch button it's got like a clear cover over it and this
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is your clear Simo switch which is conveniently located somewhere where
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you'll actually be able to reach it because like the power and reset so
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often they're located down here by the time you install two graphics cards I
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mean you can't even reach it so this is really convenient I like that then on
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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
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have two PS2 ports two digital audio ports then we
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have okay we have four Plain Jane USB
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ports and those are these two yellow ones right here and these two black ones
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right here those are just USB 2.0 then we have two USB SATA 2 ESAT combo ports
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and those are these two yellow ones here and then we have two USB 3.0 ports okay
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so that's the USB configuration on the back these standards are all
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intercompatibility
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GA 790 fxt a ud5