Hard-A-Port!
Remember that extra value I mentioned a few pages back, that GIGABYTE had added to this board while still coming in cheaper then Asus’ top end AMD board. Well here’s where it is.
The standard AMD SB750 chipset only comes with 6 SATA headers. GIGABYTE added their own controller, and added an additional 4 SATA ports to that count. Now with that many ports you’d think it’d be a cabling nightmare, but the ports are all facing the end of the motherboard, making for easy installation. GIGABYTE also place the IDE and Floppy port close to the end of the board at the middle line of the board’s span. This makes it much easier to connect something to these ports should you use this motherboard in a rather tall tower case.
Finally, GIGABYTE has implement onboard buttons for power, reset, and clearing the CMOS. They’ve even placed a safety cover on the “Clear CMOS” button, so you don’t accidentally press it. Unfortunately the placement of this button means that you have to remove your video card to remove the safety cover and clear the CMOS.
As for the ports along the lower edge, the more I look at them the more I understand what GIGABYTE is trying to implement. Rarely do system builders rely on rear brackets for FireWire and USB support. That is especially true with this board and its 8 rear USB ports and two FireWire ports. With this in mind GIGABYTE moved the USB and FireWire headers further forward to easily reach the cables for front mounted ports. They also did the same with the front panel audio, moving it close to the rear ports. They’ve even placed headers for a serial and parallel port near the bottom of the board, so you can install a bracket for those ports and place it nicely out of the way.
Though GIGABYTE has removed most of the legacy ports, they haven’t rid themselves of all of them on the MA790FXT-UD5P. Thankfully they’ve retained the PS/2 ports on the back panel. This is a good thing, as there are still good keyboards and mice out there that use the PS/2 port, and it is the most reliable form of peripheral connector. As for the rest of the ports, as I mentioned earlier there are 8 USB 2.0 ports and 2 FireWire ports present. You’ll also find 2 network ports on the back panel. GIGABYTE even setup the full connector suite for a 5.1 surround system, including optical and coaxial digital out.
Some Bedtime Reading
Finally we arrive at the documentation included with the MA790FXT-UD5P. This means that it’s time to install this motherboard and see how if fairs in our barrage of tests. First it should be mentioned that GIGABYTE’s documentation is fairly complete. They cover the installation and setup of the motherboard in an agreeable amount of depth, and give you a great deal of info on each of the motherboards functions.