Gigabyte's GA-MA790FXT-UD5P
Fully loaded

Unlike Asus' relatively restrained M4A78T-E, Gigabyte's GA-MA790FXT-UD5P is lavished with the sort of extras one might expect from a high-end motherboard. It is, in a word, pimped. That's to be expected from a board that runs about $180 online. Interestingly, though, $180 really isn't that expensive for a high-end motherboard. That's small change compared to Core i7 boards, which push upwards of $300. There are plenty of LGA775 mobos selling for north of $200, too, and yet the UD5P is the most expensive Socket AM3 motherboard that Gigabyte makes. I guess that's what happens when the most expensive Socket AM3 processor sells for only $225.

Like other recent Gigabyte motherboards, the UD5P actually has a reasonable sense of style. The board is a study in blues and white, with brushed and polished metal adding a little industrial flair.

The UD5P's layout is pretty good, too, although it's considerably more crowded than the Asus board. Gigabyte has largely managed to avoid problematic clearance issues, and it's even done a good job of putting the power plugs along the edges of the board where their associated cabling won't interfere with chassis airflow. The UD5P also has a beefier eight-pin connector for its auxiliary 12V power plug.

As one might expect from Gigabyte's Socket AM3 flagship, the UD5P is a member of the company's Ultra Durable 3 line. This tag denotes the board's use of higher quality capacitors, MOSFETs, and chokes. It also signals the board's use of a two-ounce copper layer (as opposed to a single ounce) that purportedly lowers impedance and operating temperatures while improving signal quality and stability.

Like the M4A78T-E, the UD5P feeds the CPU cores with eight power phases. However, it one-ups the Asus board by providing the processor's north bridge component with two power phases instead of just one.

The socket area itself is quite snug, and you'll run into the same DIMM slot clearance issues as on most Phenom boards. At least Gigabyte has done a good job of keeping its chipset and voltage circuitry heatsinks short enough not to interfere with larger aftermarket coolers that flare out from the socket.

We can follow the UD5P's heatpipe network from its voltage circuitry heatsink through the north bridge cooler and down to the south bridge. Here we find a second low-profile heatsink topping the board's GSATA storage controller, and that's where things get complicated. You see, rather than simply providing four SATA ports, the GSATA chip instead plugs into a couple of JMicron storage controllers, each of which has two SATA ports of its own. The end result is two pairs of SATA ports that can be configured in independent and driver-free RAID 0 and 1 arrays when the GSATA chip is running in IDE mode. Switch the GSATA chip into RAID mode, and you can also roll an effective RAID 10 or 0+1 array with four drives. Or you could just use some of the six SATA ports provided by the SB750 south bridge chip.

In any case, all of the Serial ATA ports are neatly lined up along the edge of the board to provide ample clearance for longer graphics cards. Gigabyte throws in a handy CMOS reset button, in addition to onboard power and reset buttons. However, the CMOS reset switch would be better located in the rear port cluster, where it would be accessible from outside an enclosure.

With over 42 PCI Express 2.0 lanes at its disposal thanks to a 790FX north bridge chip, the UD5P has more than enough connectivity to power a pair of full-bandwidth x16 slots. Gigabyte also throws in a trio of x1 slots and a pair of standard PCI slots. One of each will be blocked by double-wide CrossFire configs, but that still leaves plenty of expansion capacity, especially when you consider the wealth of integrated peripherals already present on the board.

Many of those peripherals are tied to ports in the rear cluster. Here you get a little bit of everything, including two flavors of Firewire and S/PDIF digital audio output. The UD5P is capable of encoding Dolby Digital Live bitstreams on the fly, making it possible to enjoy multi-channel digital output not only in movies, but games as well.

The only thing missing from the UD5P's port cluster is external Serial ATA connectivity, but Gigabyte includes a more flexible solution in the box in the form of a PCI back plate with a pair of eSATA ports. These back plate ports can be connected to any internal Serial ATA port, enabling users to choose which storage controller runs to the outside of their case. The back plate also includes a four-pin Molex power connector that should come in handy given that the existing eSATA standard doesn't include provisions for power.