Introduction:

Our previous DFI motherboard reviews here and here have convinced me of the talent of the engineers working at the DFI labs. Earlier this year, it was quite difficult to keep having faith, because DFI always manages to be a few months late when releasing their newest products, especially when a new chipset or feature is introduced.

Despite this 'always late' attitude, DFI still continues to impress me with their motherboards. Okay, their boards are not always the cheapest, neither do they have the most features on board, nor are they extra special overclocking-wise, but the combination of it all makes for unique products. From my own overclocking point-of-view, I found the P35 and P45 to be excellent, although it has to be said that there are definitely (more than) worthy alternatives on the market.

This time, DFI is back at the place where it all started, they returned to the terrain that made them world-famous ... the green grass of AMD village. We all remember the legendary Athlon XP and Athlon 64 motherboards, but before I bore you (once again) with a series of superlatives to describe my feeling about those boards, which you can find in previous articles, I'll get on with it and continue with the more interesting part of the review: having a look at the motherboard, bios, checking out the performance and of course the overclockability.

What product are we testing? A 790GX based motherboard which has gotten the DFI treatment. If you want to know more about the 790GX chipset please check out our 790GX launch article.



Specifications

CPU

# AMD® AM2+ processors: Phenom FX / Phenom / Athlon / Sempron AMD® AM2 processors: Athlon series / Sempron
# HyperTransport 3.0 (5200MT/s for AM2+) HyperTransport 1.0 (2000/1600MT/s for AM2)
# AMD OverDrive provides tuning options using the new “Advanced Clock Calibration” overclocking feature.
# Socket 940 AM2+ 65nm

Chipset

# AMD chipset - Northbridge: AMD 790GX - Southbridge: AMD SB750

System Memory

# Four 240-pin DDR2 DIMM sockets
# Supports DDR2 667/800/1066 MHz DIMMs
# Supports dual channel (128-bit wide) memory interface
# Supports up to 8GB system memory
# Supports unbuffered non-ECC x8 and x16 DIMMs

Expansion Slots

# 2 PCI Express (Gen 2) x16 slots - Hybrid CrossFireX - combination of the integrated graphics and a discrete graphics card in a PCIE slot (8-lane port). - Two graphics cards support CrossFireX; each operating at x8 (8-lane ports) bandwidth
# 1 PCI Express x1 slot
# 3 PCI slots

BIOS

# Award BIOS
# CMOS Reloaded
# CPU/DRAM overclocking
# CPU/DRAM/Chipset overvoltage
# 8Mbit SPI flash memory

Graphics

# Integrated ATI Radeon HD 3300 graphics core
# One DVI-I connector for digital LCD display
# Microsoft® DirectX 10
# Hybrid CrossFireX technology combines the onboard GPU and a discrete PCIE graphics card
# Onboard Performance cache for added performance