Another pleasant surprise with the board is the SATA slots. A total of eight SATA slots, 6 controlled by the AMD SB750 controller and 2 controlled by a JMicron JMB322 controller are included on the board. Both controllers are SATA II, up to 3.0Gb/s. The blue connectors are the JMicron controllers (SATA 07-08). It’s important to note, the SATA ports are located on the front of the board. This
wasn’t an issue for me but smaller cases may have problems with having enough space to plug the SATA cables in.

The back panel has connectors PS/2 Mouse and Keyboard as well as 2 LAN/Ethernet ports, Coax and Optical S/PDIF, an eSATA/USB port, 1394 Firewire port, and six more USB ports. The standard audio ports are also there.

One other feature that I think will change the industry is the overclock control.

From here, using the dial, you can “Auto” overclock your system. You can also put the machine to run in Green Mode, clear the cmos, and even power/reset your system FROM ON THE BOARD. I think this is great for people who want an “extreme” system but lack the knowledge or cojones to do it manually. Now, with this great concept, you can overclock easy and also easily reset any bonehead mistakes in your CMOS changes. This feature is something I wish to see on more motherboards.

Other connectors on the board include and IDE port, floppy connector and RAID 0/1/10/5 on the AMD SATAs and Raid 0/1 on the JMicron SATAs.

FORWARD!!

On to some more technical specs and review-type comments.

The 790FX-GD70 is a gaming series board with DDR3 and AM3 support by MSI. This particular board only accepts AM3 chips, not AM2/AM2+ Chips. With a lot of overclocking functions and ports/connectors, its definitely a board for enthusiasts and gamers alike.

I’ve been using the board for about 3 weeks now. I’m absolutely pleased with the board. The number of SATA slots is great for all of my various hard drives (different OS’s, etc). The expandability of the board is what really sets this board apart. Having so
many PCIe slots gives me more slots to CrossFire when I’m ready to try that. The overclocking ease is also one of the greatest features. With the touch of a button, I can have the machine safely overclocked using standard air cooling. Further, more extreme overclocking may require more cooling, but for low level overclocking, the button does fine. I can increase the overclock settings by turning a dial.

The processor I used is AMD’s AM3 Phenom II X5 810.

I did encounter one problem however, and that was when I tried to load Windows XP SP3 on the machine using AHCI. It wouldn’t take the driver on the cd nor would it take the floppy I created (yeah, floppy). A small technical matter, however. Changing the SATA
to IDE to install XP, then back to AHCI worked a charm. It was just a little frustrating when AHCI drivers wouldn’t be recognized. This issue is easily solved with a driver/patch release from MSI.