This week we managed to snag a brand new prototype Gigabyte board utilizing AMD’s new 790GX chipset. The new chipset utilizes an integrated graphics solution dubbed HD 3300 and is suppose to be clocked at a decent 750 MHz — a faster offering than the old IGP from 780GX chipset-based boards. 

With the 790GX chipset, motherboard manufacturers can elect to use AMD’s SidePort memory, which integrates discrete memory for use by the HD 3300 IGP. Configurations can come with either 64 MB or 128 MB of memory, although this particular board here comes with 128 MB. If motherboard makers chose 64 MB of memory, this limits the total bandwidth of the memory path to just 32-bits. With a 128 MB chipset, available bandwidth jumps to 64-bits, improving performance slightly.

On this specific board, users will have two Cross-Fire PCI-Express 2.0 slots along with a total of 3 1X slots although we would have preferred another 8X slot as there are very few reasons to fill up three slow ports. Memory is served up by four dual channel memory slotsThe board also includes a total of of six SATA ports and two standard ATA slots.