MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 Motherboard

The latest socket AM3 compatible Phenom II processors have been available for several weeks now and they had proven in our initial coverage to be excellent chips, a notable improvement over their predecessors in several respects, including overclocking and in their support for higher clocked DDR3 memory. Thanks to the Phenom II's ability to use both DDR2 and DDR3 memory types, they can be used in existing AM2+ boards, which is an excellent solution for many current AMD users. The AMD 790GX chipset offers an excellent low cost DDR2 solution for Phenom II owners but currently available implementations lack some of the higher-end bells and whistles that many enthusiasts and gamers want. The 790GX chipset technically supports Hybrid CrossFireX, allowing two or more discrete graphics cards to team up with the IGP, but many currently available boards generally only offer a single physical PCI-E x16 slot, there are exceptions of course but only a few.


While AMD's new Phenom II chips can also support DDR2 and are compatible with existing AM2+ boards, their full potential is only realized when equipped with a few sticks of fast DDR3. Unfortunately, so far, the pool of available DDR3-enabled AM3 boards has been rather small with only a few choices. The majority of available DDR3 equipped AM3 boards also lack the multiple PCI-E x16 slots necessary to support CrossFireX. One of the few boards with both DDR3 and full CrossFireX support is ASUS' M4A79T Deluxe, which we briefly checked out in our initial look at the AM3 Phenom IIs. Today, we'll be examining the second DDR3 full CrossFireX capable AM3 board to hit our labs, the MSI 790FX-GD70, and we'll be putting it up against the M4A79T, head-to-head to see how it stacks up.

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