AMD 780G Chipset Motherboard Preview

Gigabyte, J&W, Jetway

The Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard has one x16 PCIe lane for discrete graphics. The ATI SurroundView feature can be enabled by adding a discrete ATI Radeon graphics card to the x16 PCIe lane. This will allow a display configuration of up to four displays. Gigabyte used VGA, DVI and HDMI video outputs on the board, but only one digital display link can be used at a time. Meaning you can’t use DVI and HDMI at the same time. The AMD SB700 (south bridge) Supports 6 SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports that can be setup in IDE, AHCI, JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 10 modes, but Gigabyte used five of these port for internal SATA and then used the sixth one for eSTA on the read I/O panel. The Gigabyte board looks great with four phase power and a nice layout, but the north bridge heat sink looks like it could be larger.

The J&W A78G has what seems to be the best layout of any 780G when it comes to cooling. The CPU socket is directed in a way that the air from the AMD reference heat sink blows across the north bridge heat sink and the memory modules. This is the only board that has been designed with a heat sink that is partly cooled by the CPU heatsink and as a result the graphics on the 780G can be overclocked higher since it is running cooler. AMD informed Legit Reviews that the 780G graphics can easily be overclocked from 500MHz to 750+MHz due to this design. With active cooling on the north bridge all of the boards can pushed 750MHz+ which is a nice boost for graphics performance.

J&W sent over this break down of the I/O, which better shows the debug LED and HDMI port. Notice the slide they sent us differs from the board layout, so it looks like some last minute changes have been made. If you haven’t heard of J&W Technology before no worries as they have no offices in North America. They were established in early 1994 and are trying to become more mainstream in the motherboard market.

The Jetway PA78GT3 motherboard is the design that Jetway came up with for the 780G chipset. The board lacks HDMI and DisplayPort, but offers VGA and DVI video outputs. Jetway uses OC-CON high-polymer solid electrolysis aluminum capacitors that they claim are better than what other companies are using. Jetway also placed an LED debug display on the PA78GT3 that offers you a way to check system health when needed, which might come in handy down the road.

• AMD 780G Chipset and AMD SB700 Chipset
• Support Socket AM2+ Phenom FX processor
• Support HT 3.0
• Integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200
• Dual Channel DDR2 800 Memory DIMMs Supported
• Support 6 Serial ATA2 Devices with RAID 0, 1
• Ready for Windows Vista
• PCI Express Gigabit LAN Supported
• 8-Channel HD Audio CODEC
• CPU Vcore 7-Shift / DVI Port / Debug Port/Directx 10
• Micro ATX Form Factor