Can someone tell me where (or if) I need to plug in the sound output for a sony IDE DVD/CD Drive on this motherboard... The Sony drive indicated that these may be unnecessary aif the mobo can handle digital audio input... (sorry I'm dazed an confused after staying up till 1AM trying to find wher it plus in...) Thanks for any help!

With AMD's SB750 having the Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) module how can Nvidia continue to compete?
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3360
Once the SB750 becomes main stream you would be crazy to buy a mothrboard without ACC. Nvidia chipsets would be more expensive, slower and less reliable. It almost seems the that ACC is a way to lock Phenoms to the AMD chipset and drive Nvidia out of the market.

nice review. Just one point - given that every MB review I've read here for some time has the same comment under the HD Tach CPU utilisation graph (low, within +/- 2% margin of error), is there any point still including it?

Can the DVI and HDMI ports both be used at the same time (to connect a pair of DVI displays)?

Great review!
I have the GIGABYTE GA-M750SLI-DS4 and it's a great board. Overclocks great (AM2 4200+ 2.9Ghz), and hybridpower works well with my 9800GTX.
And I don't think my board has the 95 watt limit.

Such a beautiful board.

How can they call this a socket AM2+ motherboard if it cannot support all socket AM2+ chips? Not being able to handel 140W chips is scary if you plan to do any overclocking.

Good review as usual. I was a bit disappointed to see its integrated USB performance suffer a bit compared to the 780a, but nevertheless, for the price, it's pretty damn good. It's a better value than the 780a and (IMO) the AMD 780G at any rate.

I would have liked to see a comparison of the IGPs on the nForce 780a and AMD 780G, though, as well as video decode performance. I suspect mATX versions of these boards have a chance at becoming popular for HTPC builds.

Now where's that 750i review? ;)

When you overclock doesn't that make the TDP limitations moot anyway?

But it doesn't appear to actually enable the internal SATA port tucked behind the port cluster
There's that jumper block next to the port, maybe it switches between the internal and external ports?

It would be interesting to see a 780G/SB7x0 tested too.

Looks like a nice board. Integrated graphics too. $300 for a nice board+cpu+ram. I like.

The high power consumption at load on this MB was noted as "I suspect the power circuitry is a little overloaded here and probably not at its most efficient."
Can this be verified with a lower powered CPU?
And yes, I wish AMD would come out with 95W 9650BE.

No firewire on the rear port cluster, an unfortunate omission.

It's really sad to see AMD's chipset be so considerably overwhelmed in all forms of I/O.

It's very nice to see IGP functionality on higher end boards.

Sounds like a decent board.

A question, Geoff, about the review - as we know, PCIe 2.0 8x should have the same bandwidth as PCIe 1.1 16x. You state this in the early part of the review. However, you attempt to explain away SLI performance differences as being due to reduced bandwidth on the 750a. Can you explain? :)

Also, typo on the first line of the last page.

Cheers!

James

More boards please that aren't choked down with piles and piles of stuff I'll never use. There's something elegant about a board with ample room everywhere.