Zarolho
Power Member
We have seen how the board performs with a Phenom GP-9600 processor. Although some of you might be a bit disappointed with the results, that is largely due to the processor used. In fact, If you look at the benchmarks of games, the numbers aren't that far off from the Intel platform. The only more noticeable difference is in the multimedia encoding. In fact, the performance levels of the phenom was better than I expected.
In terms of features, this board has an array of good stuff built onto this board. Basically, what you want from a board is already there. With 4 slots of PCIe, the board is basically ready for CrossFire X. Features like Quad cooling, eSATA2, Double Phase and Quad BIOS are probably the most important enhancements added to make this board a stable and screamer.
Overclocking options are plenty on the MA790FX-DQ6. Add voltages as you want, change ram timings and CPU clks up to 500MHz. The only regret is that the CPU multipier is missing when we tested it with a GP-9600. With the Black edition X2 5000+, we are able to overclock the board to 6 x 420MHz aircooled with HT Link lowered to 400MHz (x2) and Vcore pumped to 1.40v (default is 1.25v). Click here to see BIOS Screen shots. With the Phenom GP-9600, we only achieved 220 x 10.5 = 2.53GHz. We aren't able to lower the multiplier at all as the option is missing. We can only run the multiplier at 10.5x. No matter how we lower the HT Link, 220 seems to be the limit. I wonder if it is a clkgen issue or something else. Looks like the initial retail Phenom won't be able to overclock as much as the Black edition X2 5000+ or 6400+. Another thing we noticed is that, whether you set your HT link at 1GHz (5x) or at 2.6GHz (13x), the benchmark results do not reflect an improvement in results. According to AMD utility, for the Phenom current CPUs, no matter how high you set, the HT link will never reach beyond 1.8GHz (9x).
If you were to run a single card or dual for CrossFire, there shouldn't be any issues at all. The worst nightmare would be to install 4 cards onto this board. You wouldn't be able to squeeze in those 2 slot design cards. In our test, we have to use Gigabyte's own single slot 2600XT (as shown in gallery).
Overall, the MA790FX-DQ6 mimics the DQ6 series of Intel platform (P35-DQ6) etc. It has all the power needed to drive the latest processors. The only regret is that the F2j bios still doesn't come with a multiplier option for us to overclock the system by lowering the multiplier.
Pros
[*]6 Quads
[*]CrossFire X
[*]BIOS Multiplier option missing
[*]4 slots are too close together
[*]Too costly
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