Advanced Micro Devices, better known just as AMD, has officially launched its latest and highly anticipated mainstream chipset. Based on one of the company’s earlier products, the 780G, the 790GX comes in a better and improved package. Now that the official release took place, this can only mean that the next couple of days will most likely bring announcements from a number of motherboard manufacturers that will be introducing their own 790GX-based motherboards.
If you have been paying attention to what’s been going on in the hardware industry, you might have noticed a significant change of strategy at AMD as far as its chip business goes. Both the company's chipset and graphics segments have recently put out products aimed at the mainstream market, rather than at the high-end one like it was once customary, back in the Athlon glory days. But it was all worth it since AMD is now doing much better – which would explain the release of the 790GX chipset.
The 790GX explained
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Getting right down to it, the 790GX consists of two components (compared with NVIDIA's single-chip solutions): the 790GX Northbridge and the SB750 Southbridge. The Northbridge will provide users with support for the latest AM2+ compatible processors, through the HyperTransport 3.0 link. The chipset, which is manufactured at 55nm, features an Integrated Radeon HD 3300 Graphics Processor (IGP) that can provide support for DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0. The IGP has a Unified Video Decoder (UVD), two x8 PCI Express 2.0 links (or a 1 x16 link, depending on design), DVI/HDMI interface and internal/external TMDS and DisplayPort capabilities.
The IGP on AMD's latest chipset is identical to the one found on the company's earlier 780G but, in the most recent version, it has been clocked much higher, at 700MHz, boosting the performance by up to 33%. There's also support for AMD's Hybrid CrossFire technology, meant for increased performance or low-power operation.
The AMD SB750 Southbridge is connected to the 790GX through an A-Link Express II interface. It offers support for both SATA RAID and IDE drives, boasting a total of 6 x SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports that can be setup in IDE, AHCI, JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 or RAID 10 modes. The Southbridge will also provide users with up to 12 USB 2.0 and 2 USB 1.1 ports, DASH 1.0, 6 PCI slots, HD Audio, IDE, and Serial and Parallel ports.
