Performance

The features of Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P mainboard and our highly positive overclocking experience with it indicate that despite the low price, it is a fully-functional contemporary platform. The fact that it is based on a “lite” chipset modification didn’t deprive it of any theoretical or practical functionality and the only field where we could possibly expect anything to go wrong is the performance. We needed to clear away all our doubts once and for all that is why we undertook a detailed performance investigation and compared the speed show by our today’s hero against that of the recognized enthusiast solution – Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5 board based on AMD 790FX chipset – the top chipset in AMD’s discrete lineup.

First of all, we tested the mainboards performance in nominal mode, without any overclocking. Phenom II X2 550 processor worked at 3.1 GHz, its North Bridge and HyperTransport bus worked at 2.0 GHz in both cases. The memory worked as DDR3-1600 with 8-8-8-24 timings.

We didn’t even highlight the best and worst results in the comparative table above, because the difference between them is truly tiny and lies within the acceptable measuring error margin. All this clearly indicates that the considered mainboards work equally fast, despite pretty significant functional differences between them.

But maybe the hardware differences will tell on the performance in overclocked mode? Let’s see: the second part of our test session was performed with Phenom II X2 550 processor working at 3.8 GHz obtained by raising the clock generator frequency to 246 MHz and keeping the same default multiplier. The frequencies of the North Bridge integrated into the processor and HyperTransport bus were also increased to 2.2 GHz (with 9x multiplier). The memory worked as DDR3-1638 with 8-8-8-24 timings.

But again the results of both mainboard differ by a fraction of percent. So, it means that the performance of Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P mainboard is not any lower than that of more expensive Socket AM3 solutions neither in the nominal, nor in the overclocked mode.