Conclusion of Jetway PA77GTA-VT with Phenom GP-9600 Review
Bluetooth 16 Nov 2007

Conclusion

We have seen how the board performs with a Phenom GP-9600 processor. Although some of you might be a bit disappointed with the results, that is largely due to the processor used. In fact, If you look at the benchmarks of games, the numbers aren't that far off from the Intel platform. The only more noticeable difference is in the multimedia encoding. In fact, the performance levels of the phenom was better than I expected.

Based on the AMD 770 chipset formerly known as RX780, this chipset exhibits stability throughout the test. Although it only supports a single slot PCIe 2.0 slot, it should be sufficient for most who do not intend to use CrossFire / CrossFire X. As we can see from the benchmarks, when a single card is used on the PA77GTA-VT, the performance is on par with the high end board GA-MA790FX-DQ6.

Jetway boards have been known to become the poor man's overclocking board, overtaking some of the 2nd tier manufacturers. Overclocking options are readily available to adjust the Vcore, VDimm. The additional voltages are also useful if you intend to use a water cooling system on this board.  Refer to the gallery for the options available.

When we test it with the GP-9600 processor, we are able to only overclock it to 218MHz x 11.5 which gives us around 2.5GHz. As the multiplier option is available, we tried tuning the multiplier down. The CPU just refuse to go beyond the 220MHz mark. The situation seems to be the same with a Phenom 9500 on DFI 790FX board or the Phenom 9600 on Gigabyte 790FX. In another test to determine the max CPU CLK the board can achieve, we ended up overclocking the CPU to a max CLK of only 300MHz x 5 (low multiplier). Anything beyond 300MHz, the board just couldn't boot.

Although we are not very successful with the Phenom GP-9600 overclocking on the 770 or even other 790FX boards, the board did much better with our Black edition 5000+. We tested it on two situations, the first was to increase the multiplier, we were able to achieve 16.5 x 200. That is when the Vcore is set to 1.45v, the rest remains the same.

Overall, the Jetway PA77GTA-VA is classified as the entry level Spider platform mainboard. If you just need the Quad Core performance and not really considering CrossFire in the future, this board is worth considering as I suppose it should be relatively cheaper than the NVIDIA ones.

Related Reviews 1
Related Reviews 2

(C) Copyright 1998-2009 OCWorkbench.com