AMD 790GX Chipset Platform Launch

How We Configured Our Test Systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR2-1066 (AMD) with 5,5,5,15 timings or DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel). The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems  Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA XII  Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA XII suite with an AMD Phenom X4 9850 processor installed in the Gigabyte MA790GP-DS4H motherboard (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processors running a clock speed of 2.5GHz, with 2GB of DDR2-1066 RAM installed.