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Alright, check it out, we're looking today
at the MA790X-UD4P from Gigabyte, part of their Ultra-Durable series.
Incredible motherboard, this is one of their first, more dedicated AM3 boards,
so it's gonna support your Phenom 2's.
But, of course, it also works with AM2 sockets, and AM2+,
if you wanted to throw Athlon in here,
or Phenom X3 or phenom X4 are gonna work as well.
But this is a hard, high, high board, very nice, good stuff.
First of all, 790X chipset, is what's qulaifying on the north bridge here.
So, that gives you a ton of RAID controls, a ton of hard-drive configurations.
You also have down here the SB750, south bridge chipset,
which gives you even more RAID configurations.
You also get a Gigabyte LAN over through here.
You also get CrossFireX support, as you see you have two PCI Express x16 slots.
They will operate at x8, x8, if you populate two cards,
but that does mean you can do two 487X-2's, or in the future,
two 4890X-2's, or what not, through this incredible chip,
that AMD has manufactured, the 790X, which is actually really, really cool.
Alright, now, let's talk about memory a little bit:
You have up to 16GB of DDR2, so you do 4GB DIMMs, you got four slots in total.
Those are gonna do native, up to 1333MHz DDR2, which doesn't really even exist,
it's usually 1066 and 1200, 1333 is very out-there, but, you know,
overclocks to 1333, if your memory kits are ready to go that high.
Now, the memory and the processor in the north bridge are all communicating,
using the HyperTransport 3.0 System Bus.
That is up to 5200 mega-transfers per second,
so that's the fastest, and the latest, of the HyperTransport 3.0.
You have 8 SATA ports in total on this board.
They are all over here. You have two, four, six, right there,
and then the other ones are over here, in the purple.
Pretty much, these are gonna go off the Gigabyte chip,
this is going off the south bridge chipset,
so this gives you RAIDs 0 and 1 plus JBOD,
this one gives you 0, 1, plus, 0+1 , 5 and JBOD.
So you got a few more options through these, these are the ones you wanna use,
because these are the Hardware RAID,
so if you're gonna go for stripping or striping, you wanna go use these.
For storage, these are great for RAID-1, but you can also go RAID-0 through here.
These are gonna be on a separate chip.
Gigabyte just names it as the Gigabyte SATA-2 chip, it says it right there,
but I don't know what actual chip that is. If it's a JMicron Controller,
I'm assuming it's a JMicron Controller.
Also on this board, which is really nice, you have a lot of USB ports.
So, if you really like USB connectivity, you have a lot.
Just looking at the back, you have two, four, six, eight, right there,
and it's actually 12 in total. You have another, if you look over here,
you have headers down here, these are two, they can be split to four.
That's an additional four USB ports down there,
bringing the total to 12, which is a lot.
You also have 10/100 Ethernet, going back to the front, back panel plate,
10/100 Ethernet, right there. 8-channel audio, this is using the ALC889A,
which is an incredible on-board audio chip, HD audio, 106 signal-to-noise ratio.
That's incredible, 106 Decibels. Very, very nice on-board audio chip.
Almost as good as having a discreet card.
Again, a bunch of USBs: You've got the regular Firewire,
you have the small i-Link Firewire, you got the S/PDIF,
both the coaxial-analog at the bottom, and the optical-digital at the top,
which requires a TOSLINK cable.
Over here you got PS2s, in case you got some older keyboards and mouse.
Now, let's talk a little bit about expansion on this board,
'cause there's a little bit of stuff you can do.
Taking a look at your slots, we already talked about the PCI Express slots,
right there, for your graphics card, but, you do have three PCI Express x1 slots.
So, one above this PCI Express card down here,
so this is gonna be used probably for audio cards,
there is a cut-out, sort of, in the north bridge heat-sink,
to let an audio card, you know, sit right there.
You have two extra ones here, and then on top of that, you have two PCIs,
two standard PCIs, which is very, very good.
Now, finally before I let you go, let's talk about two thing:
A. The design of the board and hardware stuff,
and then on top of that we're gonna talk about what's in the box.
Now, let's talk about Ultra Durable 3.
They're using 2 Oz. of Copper in each PCB, so in here,
if you were to able to zoom in there, and get a really good layer
of inside the middle of the PCB, they got two extra-thick layers of Copper in there,
both for heat and for conductivity, to drop impedance and resistance,
to give you better overclock, better temperatures,
and a bunch of other stuff, really good stuff.
As far as the board goes, if you look, let's see if I can get you in there,
All Solid-State Caps, these are all Japanese-made,
Ferric power chokes, lower RDS(on) and MOSFETs,
8+2 phase power for the socket, so excellent for overclocking,
two phases for the memory.
You have dual BIOS chips on here, they are down over here, there they are.
You get two BIOS chips, so if one goes corrupt, you have a second backup,
that you can switch to, or you can run two different BIOS programs on each setting.
Two different SEMOSs, and then from there, pretty much,
switch through them, one for gaming, one for overclocking,
or one for saving power, one for overclocking, whatever you want.
Another thing that's cool on here is the EC AOD-ACC,
which are the Embedded Controller for AMD OverDrive Advanced Clock Calibration.
God, that's a big one, ay? Pretty much, what that means,
is that you can overclock from inside the operating system,
whenever you want, with no problems.
Let's you adjust all the voltages on the fly, without having to reboot or reset.
Now, talking about what's in the box:
Nice eSATA cable, this is gonna go for a bracket,
but I'll show you in a second, when we show you how that works.
You get a disc, with the drivers and utilities, you know, good stuff, AM2 & 3.
A couple of manuals. I'll get back to this in a second.
Input-0utput Plate, shield, regular, labeled, not bad, still pretty good.
And, in here, wow, a floppy cable, actually an IDE cable, never gonna use it,
floppy key, never gonna use it. Orange static cables, that look really cool,
and, here's this, a badge for your case.
Now, let's talk about this, this is cool.
Here's how this works: This is a SATA on one end, Molex on the other.
You plug this into your power, you plug this into a SATA port,
you put this in the back of your computer. Now, what you have is,
two eSATA ports, right? And you have a Molex, but it's inside out,
it's going the wrong direction, so what's that for?
For this. This is, like to make, to dock, external hard-drive,
without putting it inside the case. You plug this in, Molex,
into the back of the panel, and now you have on this end, two SATA power connectors.
So you can hook this up to any two hard-drives that you want, and,
you're powering them up. And then, on top of that,
this is a SATA to eSATA cable. Very Cool. So you plug this into the backs side
of the hard-drive, this goes into the eSATA, and you've just hooked up that hard-drive,
outside of the case. Very convenient feature.
I think Gigabyte's the only person that gives you this bracket,
which is the only thing you can use that for,
and the cables and stuff, so very good stuff.
It's the Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P. AM3 Socket, good stuff for the Phenom 2's,
if you're going Phenom route, which is, makes sense nowadays.
Saves you a lot of money. It's a good board, and it's great for that.
So if you have any questions on it, email me, and I'll see you guys next time.
For more information on the Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P,
type in G452-1011 into the search engine of any of these major retailers.
For Computer TV, I'm Albert.
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