Integrated video has come a long way in the past year. Previously at most integrated graphics was good enough for most 2D output at worst it is a nightmare of compatibility and performance that hinted at poor overall components with making a product as cheap as possible in mind. With AMD's 780G though in the early part of this year that saw a dramatic facelift with great 2D performance, HD decoding, and generally good gaming performance. AMD of course released the 790GX about a month and a half ago and today we have another one of these boards to look at from ASRock.

ASRock have been stepping up the quality of their products greatly the past few years and it shows. The ASRock AOD790GX/128M on the rear panel features 2 PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard, six USB 2.0 ports, a firewire port, E-SATA port, VGA output, DVI output, HD audio analog outputs for 7.1 audio, and Gigabit Ethernet.

Onboard connectivity consists of six SATA connectors supporting RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10, an e-SATA connector, one IDE connector, a floppy connector, an HDMI_SPDIF header, a 1394 Firewire header, a Wi-Fi header, two USB 2.0 headers, front panel audio connector, CD in header, Crossfire power connector, two PCI-Express 2.0 16x slots, a PCI-Express 2.0 slot, 3 PCI slots, and of course full support of Crossfire and Hybrid CrossfireX.

To give a quick refresher of the 790GX at the Northbridge and video output is the same basic technology as the 780 Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics but the clock speed has been bumped up to 700MHz from 500MHz and sideport memory is now a must to be labeled 790GX. We are though seeing a variety of variations on sideport memory types and sizes, for example the Foxconn we looked at earlier used 128MB of DDR3 sideport memory at 1.3GHz while the ASRock we'll be looking at uses 128MB of DDR2 memory at 1066MHz which is a little slower but not by a lot. The other major addition is the new SB750 Southbridge with support now for all types of RAID and the other major factor being support for AMD's OverDrive utility and ACC or Advanced Clock Calibration. This allows for much better overclocking of Phenom processors used with the the SB750. For our ASRock with our Phenom X4 9850 BE we were able to reach 3.1GHz which is about 250MHz higher than we could with the highest-end Asus board we had previously. This is also in line with the Foxconn's overclock with this processor. ACC so far shows a lot of promise and we hope AMD keeps up to date with it. So far our results with this board and ACC it was easy to use and overclocked well although it didn't break any records.

One major thing you'll notice about this ASRock board and many others is that for SLI or Crossfire support it still uses an older physical toggle switch onboard the motherboard which must be placed in the right direction for either Crossfire support or single card support. This isn't much of a hassle but it is an older remnant we don't see on any other boards and does show again that ASRock is targeting not the highest-end market place. We hope in the future that this might fade out and their boards will automatically detect a second card for Crossfire or SLI as all other boards today do but if it does save money and keep the board a little cheaper then it might be worth it to include. Few people will be changing out between single and multiple cards often.

Accessories included with the motherboard are a quick installation guide, I/O shield, floppy and IDE cables, 4 SATA cables, SATA to molex power adapter, and a DVI-to-HDMI converted for the onboard DVI output.

ASRock unique software includes ASRock OC Tuner, intelligent energy saver, and ASRock hybrid booster. These days though with AMD Overdrive you might be better off using that utility for overclocking and power savings though it is nice to see additional software from ASRock for this.

If you're wondering if the AOD790GX/128M supports AMD's power hungry 140W Phenom CPUs it does and in addition the board features 100% Japan made high-quality conductive polymer capacitors for longer lifespan and better overclocking.

Here is the BIOS for the ASRock board. There's quite a lot to tweak here and adjust and it is definitely not a low-end BIOS. One thing we don't like is that when you set the voltage to manual adjustment it starts with the lowest value possible, we'd prefer it if it started at the default voltage for the processor so if people don't know it off the top of their head they know where they're working from.

Here are the spec from ASRock.

Let's move onto performance.

Here is our test system

Our test system was Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 with Catalyst 8.9 drivers.

If you're looking for game performance of the 790GX and other integrated graphics then check out original 790GX article.

We tested the transfer rates of our Western Digital 750GB to tested AMD's SB750 southbridge.

Next we tested external USB 2.0 transfer rates with a WD Raptor hard drive.

And finally we tested the Gigabit Ethernet using SiSoft Sandra.

Similar situation here though the Foxconn has a slight edge.