Just an update -
We will have a short chipset introduction article up shortly on the 790FX and will then follow-up on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday depending on testing results, with the performance numbers on the MSI and Gigabyte boards.
Unfortunately, at the last minute this past week there were some compatibility issues found with the retail versions (locked ratios) of the Phenom and a couple of other 790FX boards we had planned on introducing. Those boards were pulled from the review at the request of the manufacturer who will introduce revised boards within the next week (nothing shipped to retail yet, so no RMA worries). In the meantime, we did receive new retail boards from MSI and Gigabyte so those will be the first ones we look at this week.
Also, we have had a heck of a time getting the Phenoms up to speed and it simply comes down to the BIOS and CPU. The 790FX chipset is proving to be excellent with the Athlon 64 X2 processor range with HT speeds over 485 easily and HTT levels over 2000, not to mention some impressive memory tweak options on a couple of the boards (let's just say that ASUS and DFI have thrown the kitchen sink in, Gigabyte's latest beta is not too bad either for the tweaker). However, these speeds have not been possible with our retail Phenoms (which arrived late Friday) but things are looking up today.
The problem is we just received new BIOS releases today for the retail CPUs and need to retest the boards tonight, plus we also received BIOS updates for a couple of the 690G and 560/570/590 boards that now fully support Phenom just a few minutes ago. We want to get the initial results of these boards into our 790FX launch article (initial results were not pretty with a couple of early alpha/beta releases), otherwise the article might not answer a lot of potential upgrade questions.
I will go into the trials and tribulations in this article but it reminds me a lot of the X38 launch, unless these BIOS releases have really improved since Friday, the boards are not quite Phenom ready for the enthusiast, but are masterful with just about any of the Athlon X2s at this point. Also, the TriFire/QuadFire drivers are just not to the beta stage yet so those results will have to wait until AMD is able to fine tune them some more. Over the course of the next couple of weeks we will have several of the 770x and 790x boards arriving for review.
We will have a short chipset introduction article up shortly on the 790FX and will then follow-up on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday depending on testing results, with the performance numbers on the MSI and Gigabyte boards.
Unfortunately, at the last minute this past week there were some compatibility issues found with the retail versions (locked ratios) of the Phenom and a couple of other 790FX boards we had planned on introducing. Those boards were pulled from the review at the request of the manufacturer who will introduce revised boards within the next week (nothing shipped to retail yet, so no RMA worries). In the meantime, we did receive new retail boards from MSI and Gigabyte so those will be the first ones we look at this week.
Also, we have had a heck of a time getting the Phenoms up to speed and it simply comes down to the BIOS and CPU. The 790FX chipset is proving to be excellent with the Athlon 64 X2 processor range with HT speeds over 485 easily and HTT levels over 2000, not to mention some impressive memory tweak options on a couple of the boards (let's just say that ASUS and DFI have thrown the kitchen sink in, Gigabyte's latest beta is not too bad either for the tweaker). However, these speeds have not been possible with our retail Phenoms (which arrived late Friday) but things are looking up today.
The problem is we just received new BIOS releases today for the retail CPUs and need to retest the boards tonight, plus we also received BIOS updates for a couple of the 690G and 560/570/590 boards that now fully support Phenom just a few minutes ago. We want to get the initial results of these boards into our 790FX launch article (initial results were not pretty with a couple of early alpha/beta releases), otherwise the article might not answer a lot of potential upgrade questions.
I will go into the trials and tribulations in this article but it reminds me a lot of the X38 launch, unless these BIOS releases have really improved since Friday, the boards are not quite Phenom ready for the enthusiast, but are masterful with just about any of the Athlon X2s at this point. Also, the TriFire/QuadFire drivers are just not to the beta stage yet so those results will have to wait until AMD is able to fine tune them some more. Over the course of the next couple of weeks we will have several of the 770x and 790x boards arriving for review.