790GX-G65 is an AM3 motherboard, supporting AMD's latest Phenom CPUs with DDR3 RAM at speeds up to 1,600MHz. The board is aimed at enthusiasts, but the price is reason¬able. In terms of connectivity, this board has everything and the kitchen sink. The 790GX-G65 is based on the 790 chipset from AMD, so it has the Radeon HD 3300 IGP onboard, with VGA, DVI and HDMI outputs. At the back you'll find six USB 2.0 sockets, eSATA, FireWire and a Gigabit Ethernet port, plus six audio jacks for 7.1 audio and an optical SjPDIF connector. Two PCI-Ex16 slots allow for a CrossFireX, and the board also supports Hybrid Crossfire, where the onboard GPU works in tandem with a single discrete GPU.

The board also has headers for a further six USB ports and a second FireWire port, alongside less common Sights such as a serial port, coaxial SjPDIF and a header for connecting a front audio panel. The "EZ OC" feature that lets you boost the' base clock by up to 20 percent simply by flicking a pair of. switches is a nice touch, as are the onboard power, reset and Clear CMOS buttons.



In our performance tests the board did quite well for an AMD-system. It's a fact that Intel holds a huge performance advantage, but AMD still competes well on a price-performance basis. In WorldBench 6, the G65 scored 105 points. This was with the AMD Phenom II X3 720 running at 2.8 GHz, with 2 GB of Kingston HyperX DDR-3. In PC Mark Vantage, the board scored 6929 points, which is reasonable. The other tests were in line with these results, though our Cinebench tests were higher, since Cinebench uses all the cores it can get.

Overall, the board is a good foundation for a workstation or a mid-range gaming machine. It supports the new AM3 processors, so it's reasonably future proof, and the easy overclocking and variet" of make it easy to use.