Motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5

• Introduction
• Package
• Pictures
• Info

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Introduction

I had to replace my motherboard because my MSI K9N Platinum had recently been affected by the random shut-off problem explained on The Inquirer.
My choice felt on the Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5 because:

• Gigabyte has been one of the first motherboard makers, together with AsRock, to use and advertise the use of japanese capacitors and durable components - the D in DS5 stands for durable.
• The GA-MA790FX-DS5 supports up to 16 GB of RAM, great for future upgrades
• I found it in a local shop at 116 euros, while in other shops the tag price was starting from 130 euros

Package

The package includes:

• the motherboard
• 4 SATA cables
• 1 floppy cable
• 1 EIDE cable
• the backplate
• the user guide and a hardware installation guide
• the drivers cdrom

Package 179.36 KB

Package 254.44 KB

Package Content 306.67 KB

Installation guide 203.18 KB

Pictures

Layout 377.84 KB	Ports 150.51 KB	Back 309.93 KB	Backplate 292.70 KB	AM2 socket 221.62 KB	AM2 socket 211.44 KB
Heatpipe 270.97 KB	Heatsink 281.28 KB	SB Cooler 223.60 KB	Model name 281.82 KB	Made in Taiwan 239.25 KB

Pictures of BIOS (F6 version)

F6 Award BIOS
M.I.T. (Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker)
DRAM Configuration
Auto Xpress
Standard CMOS Features
Advanced BIOS Features
Advanced Chipset Features
HT Link Control
PCIE Configuration
Integrated Peripherals
OnBoard PCIE Device
Power Management Setup
PnP/PCI Configuration
PC Health Status

Some features are hidden, you have to press Ctrl+F1 to unhide them.

Info

A few remarks:

• The EIDE cable is quite short: I had to move the DVD recorder from the first to at least the third 5"25 bay to be able to connect the DVD recorder and the EIDE hard disk to the same cable.
• Removing or inserting a memory stick in slot 1 could be difficult if not impossible when cpu heat is dissipated by a large heatsink like the Noctua NH-U12F: if a fan is mounted on the front side to push air towards the heatsink, DIMM1 is right below the fan and there is enough space for a stick of RAM to be there, but not to be moved out or in; thus, insert the RAM before mounting the fan or the heatsink or mount the fan on the back side of the Noctua to pull air from the fins and push it towards the back of the case.
• Screwing the screw near the socket to fix the motherboard in the case could be difficult and require a very long screwdriver if a large heatsink is mounted on the motherboard before the motherboard is inserted in the case and if the case has a horizontal bar like the Antec SLK3000B: there is no space for a hand to turn the screwdriver. An alternative is to mount the heatsink when the motherboard is already in the case.
• (This is a personal disadvantage) Due to the position of the cooler below the socket, the 16x PCI Express slot for the video card is located at the height of the second case slot instead of the first (where there is one of the three 1x PCI Express slots); with my previous motherboard I had all the PCI slots empty except the first one and I mounted an additional 120 mm exhaust fan using the 2nd and the 7th slots of the back of the case; now I can't do it any more.

• (Supposed) Japanese capacitors and durable components should lower the probability to experience board failures and bring the quality back to the old times', pre-MadeInChina standards. Nonetheless, this motherboard is made in Taiwan.
• Right amount of coolers for a real "passively cooled" motherboard: while many boards have only one cooler for the Southbridge in place of the old small and noisy fan, the GA-MA790FX-DS5 adds to the copper Southbridge heatsink two coolers around the cpu socket and a heatpipe that should bring the heat to the Northern one, the Gigabyte-labeled heatsink which is located exactly where the air flow is massive, between the exhaust back fan of the case and the cpu heatsink fan. But there's more: the copper backplate, besides being robust enough for a heavy heatsink, helps dissipating the heat.
• The back heatsink is low enough to not interfere with the cpu heatsink and fan. Maybe Gigabyte has learnt the lesson with the first revisions of the GA-P35-DS4 and GA-P35-DQ6.

Upper clearance 143.00 KB

RAM clearance 261.69 KB

In Antec case 194.41 KB

Problems

I encountered a few problems with this board:

• Setting SATA Controller to SATA->AHCI in BIOS neither Windows XP nor Ubuntu 6.06 could see the SATA disk; I had to set it to Native EIDE to make Windows see it, and to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 to see it from Linux. With the MSI K9N Platinum I didn't have to set anything and the same SATA disk was seen without any problems from both operating systems.
• [SOLVED] Orthos blend test fails with a round error if I set the RAM clock at 800 MHz, and sometimes a BSoD appears; I had to lower the clock to 667 MHz to get the system stable. This problem appears to be related to something else because Orthos was failing with the MSI K9N Platinum too. The RAM passed memtest86 memory test.
  Update 18.10.2008: Orthos error was due to CPU failure; with a new processor Orthos reported no error during a 15 hours test

I contacted Gigabyte support and their answer has been very thorough:

• About SATA disk, I should have installed the preinstall drivers during OS setup; the user guide was not very clear about that.
• About Orthos failure, they gave me detailed instructions to try to isolate the cause of the problem, the same suggestions I found searching online; it means there are competent people at Gigabyte support.

Cooling

These are the idle temperatures read by SpeedFan (ambient: 21°C):

• cpu: 31° (confirmed by BIOS)
• motherboard: 39°C (Temp1, confirmed by BIOS)
• ?: 26°, 82°C (obviously wrong, at least the latter)
• hard disks: 33°, 30° (they're not suspended yet, still in the hdd cage)

Posted by: z24 | Fri, Sep 26 2008 | Category: /hardware | Permanent link | home
Tagged as: hardware

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