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- Date:
- Wednesday, August 27, 2008
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Gigabyte MA790GP-DS4H
Gigabyte is known for making solid overclocking and feature rich motherboards at virtually every possible price point. We've been very pleased with the Gigabyte boards we've reviewed and hopefully this trend continues with Gigabyte's latest AM2+ mbo, the MA790GP-DS4H.
Gigabyte Easy Tune 5 Pro
Gigabyte has included their Easy Tune 5 Pro software with the MA790GP-DS4H. This software has undergone very few changes over the last several months or so that its' been out. In fact over the course of the last year or so I've only really seen changes to the skin of the software which has taken a much darker tone to it since the earlier releases. The software is fairly intuitive and has a very easy learning curve. From the main screen there are several buttons that access various functions.
In the center of the main window you have an easy, advanced, graphics and a go button. On the sides of the utility window you have a Live Update, overclocking and PC Health button. In Easy mode you can adjust the percentage of the overclock to a maximum of 20%. As with all utilities of this type the overclocking is fairly conservative probably for liability reasons. In any event you won't be breaking any overclocking records with the software. The advanced button opens up a variety of options. Among those are CPU, Memory, AGP / PCI-E and PCI clock speeds. Frequencies and voltages are displayed for these categories. The CPU clock ratio is also visible and adjustable downward for non-Black Edition processors and adjustable both ways for Black Edition CPUs.
The graphics card tab contains core clock and memory clocks. These values were completely adjustable and the utility was able to overclock my test GPU without difficulty. The Live Update button should allow for BIOS updates in Windows however this function was completely non-usable and didn't do anything in my test configuration. The PC Health Monitor brings up three options. Hardware Monitor, Setting, and Alert Audio Setting. The hardware monitor launches a satellite window which displays fan speeds, temperatures, and voltages. The setting option displays fan speed and temperature thresholds that are user adjustable. The user can also toggle between Celsius and Fahrenheit. The Alert Audio setting contains settings for enabling or disabling audible alerts. The alert audio can be disabled or enabled. When enabled the audio can be set to pass through the PC speaker or a buzzer on the board itself.
BIOS
Gigabyte chose the Award BIOS for the MA790GP-DS4H. BIOS version F1a was used for testing.
The BIOS is laid out in the familiar style with several categories being accessible from the main screen. The first category accessible on the main screen is the MB Intelligent Tweaker or M.I.T. for short. This is where all the enthusiast and performance oriented settings can be found. There are a large number of settings here all relating to performance. At the top of the submenus is the HT Link Frequency, EPP mode and EPP voltage control. CPU clock ratio, memory controller frequencies and CPU host clock control are all present here. PCI-Express, VGA core clock and memory clock control is also found here.
This means that overclocking of the Radeon 3300 IGP is actually supported in the motherboard BIOS. I can't say that I've worked with too many boards that have integrated video but out of all the ones I have seen I do not recall ever seeing GPU core and memory settings. Granted I don't think anyone will see tangible or worthwhile results by overclocking the integrated video, but I think it’s' nice that Gigabyte has given the user the choice. Memory clock speeds are generally negotiated automatically but these values can be adjusted manually as well. The DRAM Configuration setting leads to a submenus where DRAM configuration settings like CAS latencies are all adjustable. Within this menu you can adjust the timings and while they normally default to automatic when set to manual all these settings are fully adjustable. You can also see the auto and SPD values next to all of the manually adjustable options. This is nice as it provides a basic reference point for the standard timings in case you have problems as a result of memory tweaks.
Back in the MB Intelligent Tweaker menus you'll find the next options under DRAM Configuration all relate to system voltages. The green line separates these values from the others listed on the page. Unlike previous boards and BIOS versions I've seen from Gigabyte manual control no longer causes the green line to switch to red and flash stating the voltages aren't optimized. That was truly annoying and it is nice to see this changed. In this section you can see System, South bridge, sideport memory, north bridge, DDR2 and CPU voltages are all adjustable here. Being able to adjust the sideport memory also allows for easy voltage adjustments to the integrated graphics memory to facilitate even stronger video memory overclocks.
Under the Standard CMOS Features menu you'll find the time and date settings along with basic SATA and IDE drive settings. Floppy mode support and halt settings can also be found here. At the bottom of this menu is information concerning the amount of installed system memory. The Advanced BIOS features menu contains several settings such as Internal Graphics Mode, UMA frame buffer size and onboard VGA connection settings. AMD C1E support can be enabled or disabled here along with virtualization and Cool 'N' Quiet. Hard Disk Boot Priorities and other boot related settings are also found here along with display priority settings. The full screen logo can also be enabled or disabled here. Integrated peripherals obviously contains settings pertaining to onboard peripherals integrated into the motherboard. IDE, ports can be disabled here and the SATA controller mode settings are found here.
What's interesting about this is that when the SATA controller is set to AHCI or RAID modes another option appears called OnChip SATA Port 4/5 Type which allows you to set ports 4 and 5 to a different setting than the other SATA ports. This is quite a bit more useful than you might imagine. As an example I've run into several problems with running a RAID volume and an AHCI volume or legacy mode SATA volume all on the same controller. These settings eliminate that problem allowing multiple volume types to co-exist on the same drive controller. Normally I have to use the second controller integrated into a motherboard or an add-in card to solve this problem. Since there is only one integrated drive controller built into this board I was very pleased to see this option. Audio, and LAN devices can be enabled disabled or configured by some basic options in this submenus as well. USB settings and serial port settings are also configured here.
The PC Health Status menu has chassis intrusion settings, CPU warning temperature settings, fan smart settings and also displays general PC health status in the by displaying voltage and fan speed values.