Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, HD Tach and Lavalys Everest, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 torture test on all cores and expanding to a looping 3DMark06. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

Currently the Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H doesn't support the Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition, although it does claim to support some 125W CPUs. Not wanting to potentially damage the board because of its limited four phase power regulation, we chose a 95W high clocked triple-core CPU: a Phenom X3 8750. It has a slightly slower northbridge, a core frequency, as well as having three cores instead of four. While this can't represent an Apples to Apples comparison it does represent the platform the board is designed for.