| ASRock M3A790GXH/128M |
 |
 |
 |
| Written by Jeff_Tom | ||||||||||||||||||
| Sunday, 10 May 2009 15:09 | ||||||||||||||||||
Although one doesn't have to upgrade from the Socket AM2+ motherboards for AMD's new AM3 processors to work if you're starting fresh going with a Socket AM3 based motherboard is probably the better way to go in the long run as DDR2 production ramps down prices are already starting to increase while DDR3 prices decrease. Today we'll be taking a look at a new AM3 board from ASRock, the M3A790GXH/128M.
We don't normally touch upon the box too much but this one looks quite cool with a reflective hologram surface, vibrant bright red background and a silver Dragon representing AMD's Platform and holding Fusion. All of the starbursts are also pretty well designed from a marketing standpoint, good job ASRock. This color is sure to get some people's attention if they're out at Fry's or another retailer.
Here's the back of the box which also features a hologram and technical information on the motherboard.
Inside the box we see all the accessories. Included are 4 SATA cables, one SATA to molex power adapter, floppy cable, driver and utility CDs, I/O shield, and ASRock X/Fire switch card.
Though the box might be bright red the PCB of the board is ASRock standard blue with a few neon highlights in the CPU clip and PCI-Express slots. Overall the board layout is fairly solid, the CPU power is out of the way enough from the CPU socket so if you're using a massive heatsink for overclocking it's still easily reachable or trying to remove the power adapter in the case. All too often CPU power is right to the case and the motherboard at the top in a difficult position. Even the IDE connector is out of the way of the PCI-E 16x slot so it shouldn't get in the way of any graphics card. Our main complaint isn't with the layout at all but actually the switch card which is necessary to enable Crossfire which is a relic of days past. We're not sure if this saves ASRock much money but we do hope they'd move on by now to the board automatically detecting other cards. Everything else with the layout is good though.
Everything is here for video output including VGA, DVI, and HDMI connectors. The board also features a hefty six USB 2.0 ports which we like to see, one PS/2 port, optical audio output, 7.1 analog audio output, Gigabit Ethernet, E-SATA, and Firewire. Not much more you need here.
Here we see one PCI-Express 1x slot followed by a 16X PCI-Express slot, another 16x slot, a PCI slot, a 16X PCI-Express slot, and a PCI slot.
The copper, green, and neon orange of the heatsink clip blend together pretty well to make the motherboard much more vibrant.
Here we see the DDR3 slots for the motherboard and the rated speed up to DDR3 1600 for the board.
Four SATA slots are on the side of the board with two more slots on top. We also see the Southbridge heatsink and IDE connector just above the PCI-E slot as well as the Crossfire toggle switch.
The BIOS is very customizable and easy to overlcock and tweak and also full of all the important information and settings one requires. It seems to be a big improvement over the ASRock BIOS of years past.
For those curious we tested with a Phenom II X3 720 BE which does feature a fourth core and when we enabled ACC in the BIOS it did detect it and it worked great with the ASRock 1.01 BIOS. We're not sure how long this will work or what batch of processors have a fourth core but in our case it worked with this board and our CPU. Another unique feature to this board is ASRock's instant boot which is basically an enhanced S3/S4 mode. After you shutdown the system reboots automatically and goes into suspend mode so you have basically a fresh running computer when you boot back up from suspend. Here's ASRock's chart on this.
Overclocking the HyperTransport bus we hit 2.3GHz stable which is a good overclock. We also overclocked the GPU of the 790GX and topped out around 900MHz which is pretty standard for this chipset.
Here are the technical specs from ASRock. CPU - Support for Socket AM3 processors: AMD Phenom™ II X4 / X3
(except 920 / 940) and Athlon II X4 / X3 / X2 processors
Our test system was Windows Vista Premium SP1 64-bit. ATI Catalist 9.4 was the driver revision. We tested only the onboard video.
The AM3 board sees a 1fps gain over the Asus in our first benchmark with Crysis.
Unreal Tournament 3 is basically identical.
PCMark 05 sees a bigger difference between the two with the AM3 board coming out on top.
Basically identical graphics performance in 3D rendering with Cinebench.
DDR2 appears to consume slightly more power than DDR3 memory.
Pricing: Score: 96%
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Last Updated on Sunday, 10 May 2009 15:29 |
