Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5 review

Gigabyte’s GA-790FXTA-UD5 is a feature-packed and rather expensive ATX motherboard. Its fast AMD 790G chipset isn’t the latest, but matches new AMD 890-based boards with an Overall score of 120 in our benchmark tests.

The main difference between the 790 and its successor is the paired SB750 southbridge’s lack of support for SATA3. However, Gigabyte has fitted a dedicated SATA3 controller that provides two SATA3 ports alongside the six SATA2 ports supported by the SB750, while another supplies two dual-purpose USB/eSATA connections on the back panel.

You’ll also find six dedicated USB ports, two of which are USB3, and two PS/2 ports, so your keyboard and mouse don’t have to use any of your USB connections. There are six driver-definable 3.5mm analogue audio ports and both optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs. Finally, there are both 8-pin and 4-pin Firewire ports and, very unusually, two 10/100/1,000Mbit/s Ethernet network ports, which are useful if you need either a redundant or load balanced network connection.

There are plenty of expansion slots: one PCI-E x1 slot, three PCI slots and three PCI-E x16 slots, two of which run at the full x16 and one of which runs at x8. You could use them for three-way CrossFireX, although we prefer to just use a single powerful graphics card. Installing a double-height graphics card in any of the PCI-E x16 slots will block a PCI slot, but there are plenty to go round. You can install up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM running at up to 1,866MHz, including error-correcting ECC memory if your processor also supports it.

The GA-790FXTA-UD5 performs well and has plenty of bells and whistles, but it’s more expensive than most and has only limited SATA3 support. Unless you specifically need some of this board’s more unusual features, we recommend the cheaper MSI 890GXM-G65 instead.