MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 Motherboard

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 with 5,5,5,15 timings or DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings. 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  AMD AM3 Compare

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2009  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 2009 suite with AMD's new Phenom II X3 720  processor (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at the default clock speed of 2.8GHz, with 4GB DDR3-1333 RAM running in unganged mode.

All of the various SANDRA CPU benchmarks we ran reported scores in line with expectations. The MSI 790FX-GD70 performs similarly to the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe, which is based on the same 790FX chipset. We can see in the processor benchmarks that there isn't much to seperate these two higher-end AMD boards in terms of performance according to SANDRA. Things are a little bit more interesting in the memory bandwidth test where we can see the advantage that DDR3 brings over the 790GX based DDR2 reference system. Both of the 790FX based systems running DDR3 came out ahead of the 790GX based reference system running DDR2.