jhurst747

I got the board primarily because it was the cheapest of the 790FX chip sets that I could find. It's well constructed in regard to durability however, the placement of several key components leave much to be desired.

This board is setup to take 4 cards. If you run standard XFire and use 2 cards, you'll have access to 16x PCI-E in a 16/0/16/0 configuration. If you run 4 cards, they go to 8/8/8/8 configuration. The instructions were not that great either. Whoever they hired to translate the Japanese to English needs to find another occupation. When I was looking in the manual to reference the correct speeds of the PCI-E slots, it told me that if I were only going to use 2 cards that I needed to install both of them in the mazarine colored slots and only use the blue slots if I'm using 4 cards. Oddly enough, I still can't figure out what Mazarine is supposed to really look like. I do know that the x16 slots were a standard blue color and that the x8 slots are baby blue. Confused yet? I certainly was.

There were two other things with the board that were very inconvenient as well.

Firstly, where the power connector is located is the same spot that any cases hard drive bays are normally placed. This means a nice tight squeeze for those of us who got tired of behemoths like a full size case. I literally had to massage the wiring to form into a 90 degree angle just so it would fit beside the hard drives.

Secondly is the placement of the SATA connectors. There are 4 blue connectors and 2 maroon connectors. The problem is that there is no clear documentation regarding the maroon connectors. Just for reference, they're for Promise T3 connections so don't plan on using them. Where my main concern lies is that the board is marketed to be used with 4 cards in XFire but the problem is that card #3 sits right on top of the SATA connectors. Good luck hooking up a hard disk or optical drive if you have 4 cards.

The board doesn't develop very much heat thanks to a heat pipe system which seems to me to have become more of a styling feature more than an effective cooling feature. This was one of the few times it seemed to work on a motherboard I've encountered. I'd rather have great functionality than flair.

My only other complaint was that the board was a bit tacky. I'm not talking about style here. I'm talking about the epoxy used on the board. I can see myself needing to buy some filters just to keep the dust from sticking to the board. That can not only result in cooling issues but could honestly be a fire hazard as well. I'm going to try the board for a week to see if I truly like it before making a final decision.

The BIOS is a bit plain Jane. Although it has more than the typical BIOS in terms of overclocking, there are plenty of other boards that offer more options. This does the job though and does a good job of it. I can't complain too much as I rarely utilize the majority of options in a BIOS anyway.

Overall, the board is a fair choice for anyone looking for a 790FX chip set at a "reasonable" price. I paid 149.95 for mine.

If I see more to the board than meets the eye, I'll post more here.

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edit: I'll attempt to post a picture of the board in action this evening to give you a feel for how the layout looks when in actual use. Too many main boards look great by themselves but rarely depict how cramped things can get when in use.