AMD 790FX Phenom Chipset On Linux

Conclusion:

The focus of this article was just to look at the Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5 motherboard and share our initial compatibility information between Linux and the AMD 790FX Chipset. Our testing thus far has yielded a positive trouble-free experience. It's unfortunate to see the SB600 used and we are certainly looking forward to the SB700, but on the opposite end of the table, the SB600 is well supported under Linux. We are in the process of finishing up our AMD Phenom benchmarks on Linux, and we will be reporting those results later this week. We will be looking at the AMD Phenom performance and comparing it to the dual-core competition in GCC compiling, OpenGL performance, and other common Phoronix benchmarks. To make the Spider platform complete, in addition to the quad-core Phenom processor and Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5, we will also be using an ASUS Radeon HD 3870 512MB graphics card in our tests.

We will draw our final conclusions on the MA790FX-DS5 once we share the performance results, but this Gigabyte creation is standing up to be a nice introductory Phenom motherboard -- that is if you are interested in a Phenom processor to begin with. The MA790FX-DS5 doesn't support four-way CrossFireX or some of the other bells and whistles, but its working fine with Linux and costs just a little over $200 USD.