Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P review

Unlike many AMD motherboards, the Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P has no onboard GPU. If you’re a gamer you’ll doubtless have a discrete card anyway, but it means this board might not be the obvious choice if you’re building a standard desktop.

But dropping the graphics hardware frees up space on the backplate, which Gigabyte puts to creditable use. You get a generous eight USB connectors, plus two PS/2 connectors (a convenience that’s all too rare these days), and FireWire in both 6-pin and 4-pin variants.

Storage and expansion are well catered for, too: the MA790XT-UD4P has eight internal SATA ports, plus three PCI-E x1 slots which we’re sure will be useful to someone, somewhere.

And even with a graphics card the MA790XT-UD4P has an admirably low power draw: our test system, equipped with an ATI Radeon HD 4550 card, drew just 66W when idle.

With no onboard buttons and no IGP, the Gigabyte is perhaps not the obvious basis for a cheap and cheerful DIY system. But with support for up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM – at speeds up to 1.66GHz – and an 8-pin CPU connector, it’s a solid board that promises a long life.