DFI LanParty UT 790FX Motherboard Review

As some of you may know the Black Edition processor is similar to the FX in that it comes completely unlocked from the factory. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal except that the 5000+ is also an amazing overclocker. For instance out of the box we cranked the multiplier up to 16.5x for a resulting OC of 3.3 GHz with only a slight bump in voltage. With a few more voltage adjustments this processor will run at 3.4Ghz easy. Using 3.3Ghz as our overclocking basis we set out to see what the 790FX is capable of.

There are 2 overclocks we wanted to show in this review, the first is what we like to call "the sweet spot" and is a perfect combination of processor cycles and memory frequency to get the best performance without going completely insane.  The second overclock is where we pushed the board to its stability limit in an attempt to get even better performance.

The overclocks in question are show below with our CPUZ screen shots

As with all of our reviews we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head to head byte match. The results of this can be seen below. 

The clear performance winner here is 300Mhz HT, the resulting frequency put our processor right at 3.3Ghz and left our memory multiplier at DDR940 which is still below the limit of our Patriot memory but much higher than stock.

You may also notice that we also overclocked the HT Link in these tests; this doesn't translate into much in terms of performance gain but does illustrate how well this chipset can oveclock. Our goal was to try and reach 400HT, despite our efforts at frequency adjustment and voltage control we just couldn't get past 360HT (or 350HT stable)

When this board was first announced there were several reports of 385HT overclocks so 400HT is likely to be attainable, however your mileage can and will likely vary.