Last month, we reviewed the ASRock A780GHM/128M and found it to a price/performance winner. We would expect more from the big brother based on the 790GX chipset. ASRock M3A790GXH/128M didn't disappoint me. Although it is based on a proven chipset pair AMD790GX+SB750, it opened up more interesting functions of opening the hidden gem of this ACC feature enabling the 4th core of X3 processor.

Features wise, this board has a Radeon HD 3300 integrated graphics that performs better than the Radeon HD 3200 on the A780GHM/128M board. It can also do hybrid CrossFire.  Even if you just get the board and processor, you already have a powerful system for playing back your BluRay 1080p using the DVI-D or HDMI output (there are three VGA Output options: D-Sub, DVI-D and HDMI). If it is not powerful enough for games, pair it up with a selected low end graphics cards and you can enable hybrid CrossFire to enhance performance. As it has 3 PCIe slots, this board can support CrossFireX. If not, just use the PCIe x16 slot with a high end graphics card. There are also 6 x SATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 and JBOD), NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions and PCIE Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s on board for your expansion. Other interesting features include smart BIOS, I.E.S and OC Tuner.

Performance wise, the board did better in some benchmarks when paired with DDR3. The numbers in the SiSoft Sandra memory benchmark shows a big performance jump. The same happened in some game benchmarks. Some are quite significant differences while some are minute. Overall, there is certain some performance gains using DDR3 at 1600MHz.

Overclocking features wise, this board has large range of selections where you can choose from. Although we can do a lot with BIOS settings, overclocking it via the ASRock OC Tuner seems to be an easier task than to meddle with BIOS settings other than the HT link, DRAM timings (HT set to 1GHz, DRAM set to C7,7,7,20T, DDR2-800). In our tests, we are able to overclock the X3 710 to 3.38GHz. That is better than what we achieved on the A780GHM/128M @ 3.13GHz. Anything higher will result in instability.

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Pros

• I.E.S
• OC Tuner
• Side port memory
• CrossFireX, Hybrid CrossFire

Cons

• No Debug LEDs
• No power sw, reset sw, clr cmos switch

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.