AMD today announced the release of their latest IGP chipset the 790GX. This comes of the success of their 780G chipset widely acclaimed to be the best integrated graphics chipset on the market. So the 790GX has a lot to live up to.
The 790GX is clocked higher than the 780G, features a new Southbridge and power saving techniques used in the Puma laptop line. The 790 series boards will also feature at least 2 PCIe2 (Crossfire) slots where as the 780G has just one.
3dMark scores of around 2000-2500 are expected from the IGP, this doesn"t sound much compared to a discrete graphics card but, when compared to other similar IGP"s used on integrated motherboards it shows a 4X increase.
This is again a big plus for the consumer when integrated graphics platforms make up some 90% of the systems bought at retail in the U.S. by consumers, according to NPD.
The chipset also offers "sideport" memory capability, an on board 64 or 128M DDR2 or DDR3 which acts as a local frame buffer to further increase speed and 3dmark scores.
The GPU its self is based on the ATI RV610 core and has 40 shaders found in the 34x0 of AMD previous generation of cards, it also supports AVIVO HD and UVD so decoding of HD is offloaded from the CPU.
The 790GX can output the display to all the latest standards including DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort.
The new SB750 southbridge also adds RAID to the mix and an new and interesting over clocking option to anyone dropping a Phenom in to it.
ACC, or Advanced Clock Calibration as a direct communication link from the southbridge to the CPU, where as this is normally done via the northbridge.
This new chipset also cure"s the big headache of the 780G chipset, not being able to use a top of the line Phenom X4 due to the 140W power requirement.
To coincide with the release of the 790GX AMD has also released a new version of its Overdrive Utility – with a new green and black colour scheme.