Gigabyte 790FXTA-UD5

Retailing for US $260 the Gigabyte 790FXTA-UD5 is the most expensive motherboard here. That said it’s a decent buy thanks to its extensive features and exemplary performance.

Being a high-end board the 790FXTA-UD5 packs an overclocking-friendly BIOS. It allows you tweak your CPU’s voltage, bus speed, multiplier and much more. The ranges on offer are also impressive; you can take your CPU’s voltage to a scintillating 1.75volts, while the memory voltage can be cranked up to 2.445volts. We recommend using these high settings only if your CPU and memory has serious cooling.

Examining the Gigabyte’s blue PCB the board appears quite cluttered and this is simply because it is packed with expansion options and other features. However, despite its packed PCB there were no glaring issues that we spotted while using the board to build our PC around. The only change we’d make would be to move the memory slots away from the CPU socket, so massive heatsinks can be fitted with ease.

When we fed the 790FXTA-UD5 our suite of benchmarks it made a solid case for its high price by offering sky-high results. Its scores of 59fps and 271.69fps in World in Conflict and Street Fighter IV game benchmarks were the highest we recorded in this grouptest and it also ripped through our application encode and compression tests in record time.