North versus South

So if you've just read my introduction, probably the first thing you are wondering about is this: what's the difference in-between the RD790 chipset and this RD770 chipset? Well not a lot really, the chipset boils down to fairly similar features. The biggest difference is that  this board has a single PCIe x16 slot, while the RD790 ASIC will be the one with two to four PCIe x16 graphics slots.

So that's the biggest negative, the lack of official CrossFire support for 770 boards. Other than merely having one PCIe x16 graphics port .. there's horribly little to complain about! Especially when if comes to graphics cards, really how many of you are actually planning to utilize multiple graphics cards setup in Crossfire? This should not be an issue for 95% of users out there.

The AMD 770 Northbridge chip is produced on a 65 nm node, and it is a very small die. Each chip is relatively inexpensive to produce, and margins and yields are to be considered good, which makes it a relatively inexpensive chipset. The chip supposedly draws around only 7 watts as well.

We initially expected the motherboards to be have ACC, advanced chipset calibration stripped away, but much to our surprise ... the BIOS is an overclocking Walhalla with ACC functionality and everything.

Next to that, Gigabyte pairs the RD770 Northbridge chip with a newly, more revised version of the SB600, which was previously bundled with the 770 chipset. We now see that the SB710 Southbridge chip is included. SB710 brings two more USB ports, two additional SATA ports and from what we heard better support for SSD and hybrid flash drives. So overall the package is just really good.

Furthermore Gigabyte STUFFED this 79 USD product with a bucket load of features that quite honestly are stunning for a motherboard in this price-range.

First of some of the primary advertised features:

1. Ultra Durable 3 Classic Technology with extra added copper cooled quality for lower working temperature
2. Revolution energy saving design with Easy Energy Saver technology
3. Supports AMD Phenom II/ Phenom/ Athlon series processors including Socket AM3.
4. Dual Channel DDR3 1666+, four DIMMs
5. One PCI-E 2.0 x16 interface
6. Integrated SATA 3Gb/s with RAID function
7. Features high speed Gigabit Ethernet and IEEE1394
8. Quality 8-channel High Definition Audio
9. DualBIOS with dual hardware BIOS protection
10. 100% 50,000 hours lifespan of Japanese solid capacitors design