Post Cards from the Edge - AMD 780G, NVIDIA 790i, Gigabyte 680i
by Gary Key on April 5, 2008 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
AMD 780G Motherboards
It has been an agonizingly slow process dissecting seven boards and trying to devise a set of benchmarks that satisfy the home theater, casual gaming, and home office crowds all at once. We think our roundup will come close but there are sure to be a few bumps in the road. We await your comments on the upcoming video analysis and roundup articles over the coming days.
However, we almost did not finish our testing (we actually still have some Phenom benchmarks to complete) as we lost four of our seven boards during final benchmark sessions this past week. It very easily could have been seven out of seven, but we stopped the killing spree after verifying why our boards seemed content to go to digital heaven without Kevorkian assistance. We could stop here and say wait for the article, but that would be sensationalist journalism, right?
Our normal course of testing has us installing a wide variety of processors in each board, regardless of the target market. We do this to ensure compatibility, and at times (like now) we wish this was not the case. This week, we tested the 780G boards with the LE1600, 4400+ X2, 4850e X2, 6400+ X2, Phenom 9600BE, Phenom 9900, and now the 9850BE.
We discovered quickly that running the 9900/9850BE or 6400+ X2 on these products resulted in the loss of the board, in a matter of a few seconds to a few minutes. Granted, it will probably be rare that a user will purchase a 9850BE to run on this platform, but in case you were considering that course of action, we highly suggest you do not. Let’s get this out of the way quickly; it is not a 780G chipset problem. In fact, it is not strictly a board problem either, but rather a design issue.
This design issue can just as easily occur on NVIDIA or Intel chipset boards, so while we are talking about the 780G product line, just be aware that it can happen on any board with any chipset. In fact, our last GeForce 8200 has already experienced a painful demise. The design issue comes down to the manufacturer trying to balance performance requirements and costs when providing a product in this market sector. The budget sector is very price sensitive, and for the most part users will typically use a lower-end processor.
The vast majority of the 780G boards have a three-phase or four-phase PWM circuitry design. These designs are completely acceptable for the 45W, 65W, 89W, and 95W TDP rated processors; however, drop in a 125W TDP processor such as the Phenom 9850e or 6400+ X2 and you are asking for trouble. Trouble is exactly we found, as each board we tested eventually succumbed to the greater power requirements of these 125W TDP processors.
The four-phase motherboards held out longer and seemed to run fine at stock speeds for a short period. Trying to overclock these boards even slightly resulted in almost immediate board failure. The three-phase boards did not fare as well since we blew MOSFETS on power-up, or they failed after a short OCCT load. We have returned the failed boards for analysis. However, we are comfortable with our statements after spending the past two days on the phone with the board manufacturers and AMD.
Now for the kicker. Although we were testing with a Phenom processor, that does not mean the manufacturer had qualified the board with this particular CPU. So while those front page ads and marketing information list all the processor families that will theoretically run on a board, users need to read the fine print or search for the suppliers' QVL/CPU support lists to ensure the desired processor has been qualified. We also plan to provide this information in the review process.
We searched each vendor’s website to find out if we were “running” the board out of spec with the 9850BE/9900 processors. What we found was very interesting, and we are having spirited discussions with the motherboard companies and AMD at this time.
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BikeDude - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
Gary, I just sent you an e-mail detailing some of my woes with PowerDVD. I look forward to your coverage of this abysmal piece of software, and I hope you will do some digging into questions like 'why do they spawn all those processes?'. Does it really take 110MB worth of software just to play a DVD or blu-ray movie? (I guess they have to justify their $100 price tag somehow)Dobs - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
Personally I find the AMD 9900/9850BE @ 125W killing mb's to be the biggest news in this story.... This is like a "Don't risk AMD" commercial for me!Also this is the first I've heard about the X-48 8Gb issue???
"c) Haven’t found an Intel X48 board yet that will handle 8GB of DDR3 properly..."
X-48 (P5E3 Prem.) and 8 Gb is exactly what I want for my next build (like now).. and this is the first thing I heard about this 8 Gb problem. Is it just a problem for particular boards or all X-48 ICH9R chipsets??? Can someone please point me in the right direction to research this problem more?? (links please)
Thanks in advance.
Oh and congrats to Anandtech for a seriously gutsy story - well done!
Dobs - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
Personally I find the AMD 9900/9850BE @ 125W killing mb's to be the biggest news in this story.... This is like a "Don't risk AMD" commercial for me!Also this is the first I've heard about the X-48 8Gb issue???
"c) Haven’t found an Intel X48 board yet that will handle 8GB of DDR3 properly..."
X-48 (P5E3 Prem.) and 8 Gb is exactly what I want for my next build (like now).. and this is the first thing I heard about this 8 Gb problem. Is it just a problem for particular boards or all X-48 ICH9R chipsets??? Can someone please point me in the right direction to research this problem more?? (links please)
Thanks in advance.
Oh and congrats to Anandtech for a seriously gutsy story - well done!
lamikr - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
At least I got from the previous 780G articles a feeling that these boards are designed for the people wanting to build HTPC systems with decent processing power of handling the encoding of full HD movies. And for this purposes the 780G boards are simply the best ones that have so far been released.When one wants instead of using the CPU's with 125 W of power consumption, it changes the requirements very much.
(One starts talking from the CPUs which have 2-3 times bigger power consumption TPD compared to 4850e)
Therefore it is understandable that those systems will also need some other type of motherboard than mATX.
I however agree that the 780G board manufacturers should now start mentioning the maximum TPD that their boards support.
Mika
BikeDude - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
Ditto.I have an old 4GB system now, and given the low price of memory, I'd certainly go for at least 8GB in my next configuration. Even my laptop has 4GB now. (I'd like more there as well, but it is hard to find laptops that offer more room for expansion, heck some are still maxed out at 2GB!)
Tuvoc - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
Well on the Intel side, the ASUS P5N-E SLI is a budget board, with 3=phase power. Yet it has been running my 130w QX6700 for over one year now 24/7. So 3-phase power can cope with power hungry CPUscjb110 - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
I was just wondering how much of the problem with the Gigabyte board is their fault? It sounds like the handling of the problem wasn't ideal, but from a technical point? Did gigabyte make the board badly? bad bios coding?Surely nvidia have something to answer for? after all they made the chipset and provided the info (or not) as to how it works and what it can do?
Blazer7 - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
All 3 680 based ASUS boards do support the QX6850 and Wolfdale. In fact ASUS released a beta that offers support for Yorkfield too but that works only when running @ stock. Any attempt to oc results in stability issues. Yet they did good on their claims for their boards and they also proved beyond any doubt that the problem lies with the design and not with the chipset.On the other hand Gigabyte did advertise their board as one that featured “several next generation technologies including FSB1333 support for the record-setting Intel® Core 2 Extreme Quad Core processors”. Guess what, they didn't deliver. The board does not support a single 1333 Quad Core, Extreme or other. Not even Wolfdale is supported.
Kudos to AT for their stance on this one. It sure took a lot of guts to publish this article especially considering that Gigabyte must be spending quite a bit here @ AT for all these banners and ads.
johnsonx - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
On Thursday afternoon I left a new system build running at my office. It uses an X2-6400 on an ECS AMD770 board. Just like the 780 board you have, I see on ECS' website that they don't officially support the 6400 or any other 125W TDP processor. I didn't think to check, I just ASSumed that any new board that claims to be Phenom ready would support any current AMD CPU. I wonder what I'm going to find when I go back to the office? Stay tuned...johnsonx - Tuesday, April 8, 2008 - link
Well, if anyone at all was curious, the system survived a few hours of Prime95, so I delivered it to the customer. At this point I'm ASSuming that the board can handle the X2-6400 just fine.