Another 790GX board arrives in our labs and we take a close look at it today. This variant of the AMD 790GX/SB750 board is quite different from the previous two we reviewed. The Gigabyte had 128M DDR3, the BIOSTAR had 64M DDR2, and the ASRock has 128M of DDR2 as sideport memory.

This mainboard supports the Socket AM2+ / AM2 processors: AMD Phenom™ FX / Phenom / Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core / Athlon X2 Dual-Core / Athlon 64 / Sempron processor up to 140W processor. With the new SB750, the board supports AMD OverDrive™ with ACC feature (Advanced Clock Calibration). It comes with 4 DIMM slots supporting DDR2 1066/800/667/533 non-ECC, un-buffered memory of up to 8GB MAX

You can operate this board in many ways. With it's Integrated AMD Radeon HD 3300 graphics DX10 graphics (PS4 support) of max share of 512MB, you can run the board out of the box. On top of that, with the 128M Sideport memory for the iGPU, you can tap the extra memory for better performance. Depending  on what display you have, you can hook the board with D-Sub, DVI-D and HDMI (w/HDCP) with DVI-to-HDMI Converter to the necessary screen display for HD playback in 1080p. The audio is also a ALC890 with 110dB dynamic range. For video transfers, there is a PCIE x1 Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s using RTL811C. There is also 1394 support on this board.

If you are a light gamer, you can pair up the integrated graphics with a matching card for Hybrid CrossFire. If you feel that it is not fast enough and require better performance, you can choose to run the board with an external graphics card or run 2 ATi cards in tandem in CrossFire mode. This board allows you to toggle the two PCIe slots to operate in single slot PCIex16 mode or Dual x8  mode for CrossFire. There are also 1 x PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot and 3 x PCI slots.

The board also comes with 6 x SATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 and JBOD), NCQ, AHCI and "Hot Plug" functions, 1 x eSATAII 3.0 Gb/s connector (shared with 1 SATAII port), 1 x ATA133 IDE connector (supports 2 x IDE devices).

In addition to all these features, this board comes with the ASRock OC Tuner for overclocking in Windows and Intelligent Energy Saver to conserve power. The smart bios also allows you to save 3 profiles so that you can save and load them easily as an when necessarily. ASRock also feature DuraCap (better Japanese capacitors for prolong usage) and Extra ESD (for better protection of devices)

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