Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H AM2+ Motherboard Review

The box used is quite conservative and keeps with Gigabyte’s trend in box artwork, promoting the product model. Immediately relevant information is also presented, such as CPU support and IGP support.

The board comes with all the accessories you would need to fully utilize its features.

The GA-MA790GP-DS4H has a relatively safe and simple setup. The only problem I could foresee is the floppy connector’s location, but who uses floppy but for BIOS flashing?

The memory sockets are color coordinated, with memory pairs going in same colored slots to enable dual-channel functionality. With large tower coolers and tall memory modules, the first slot may be rendered useless.

Under the modest heatsink is the SB750 southbridge. Next to the heatsink you can see the DualBIOS solution that protects against BIOS corruption. The SATA2_2 and SATA2_3 connectors can be blocked with CrossFire full length cards, so having cables with 90 degree bends may be critical.

There are plenty of slots for expansion. Three PCIe x1 slots, two PCIe x16 slots (operating at x8 in CrossFire), and two PCI slots open up many expansion opportunities.

The GA-MA790GP-DS4H is rated for 140w TDP CPUs and therefore supports every AM2, AM2+ and AM3 CPU that AMD has launched. The system uses 5-phase PWM controls by the ISL 5-phase PWM controller.

Keeping true to its hybrid roots, VGA, DVI, and HDMI video output along with optical and analog sound output are available. In addition to these, legacy PS2 ports, a FireWire800 port, four USB2.0 ports, and a gigabit Ethernet port are all easily accessible.