Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review

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Board Layout

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review
The Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard has a very clean layout even with a multitude of things that are on the board. It is amazing to see how they get so much stuff on this board!
Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review

The heatsinks run from the top left down to the bottom right of the board and seemed to do a great job of keeping everything cool as we had no heat related issues at all.

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review

The top right of the board sports four dimm slots which support up to 16GB of DDR3 memory in dual channel configuration at speeds of 1600(OC)/1333/1066. Right next to the dimm slots, we have an IDE connector that is powered by the SB750 and a floppy connector. Just above those we have a 24-pin power connector, and right to the left of it we have a power and a reset button, which happens to be one of my favorite things on the board.

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review

Just a closer look at the power and rest buttons!

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review

The bottom right of the board is where we find the SATA connectors. Six of these connectors are powered by the SB750, and are SATA2 compliant. They support RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD. The other four SATA connectors are powered by the Gigabyte SATA2 chip and support RAID 0, 1 and JBOD. The very bottom right corner is the location of the front panal pin connectors, which are color coded for ease of use. There are also a couple of USB headers and a firewire header here.

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review

Here is a closer look at all the SATA connectors…

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review

…and the front panal pins.

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review

The bottom left of the board is where we find our add-on card slots. The Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P has two legacy PCI slots, three x1 PCI Express slots and two PCI Express x16 slots which support ATI CrossfireX technology.

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review

Audio is also on this part of the board and is supported by the Realtek 889A Codec which can provide up to 7.1 Hi-Def audio. Lan is provided by two Realtek 8111DL chips which support gigabit speeds.

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review

Top left of the Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard is where we find the CPU socket. This board is an AM3 supporting motherboard for quad and triple core processors. The CPU socket was clear of anything that would hinder the installation of an aftermarket heatsink.

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review

If there was one complaint, it was the location of the 12v 8-pin connection. It was a little hard to get to, or maybe I just have fat fingers…

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard Review
The back I/O ports include:

  1. 1 x PS/2 keyboard port
  2. 1 x PS/2 mouse port
  3. 1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector
  4. 1 x coaxial S/PDIF out connector
  5. 2 x IEEE 1394a port
  6. 8 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
  7. 2 x RJ-45 port
  8. 6 x audio jacks (Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out/Rear Speaker Out/Side Speaker Out/Line In/Line Out/Microphone)

Let’s take a look at the BIOS…

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