What Do You Think of This Motherboard?

Excellent deal, and will prep you for coming advances to the CPU.

Igot curious and clicked on the link. Man...those prices are much less than I thought they'd be. At those rates I should be able to aquire parts fairly quickly. Thanks Island Dog.

Yeah, I have priced out my desktop update at $285.  That is with that mobo, an AMD quad-core, and 4GB of RAM.  

if you end up getting that board, i'd like to know how happy you are with it. it looks like a good candidate to recommend to customers wanting an inexpensive but good amd board.

Good deal on that board, i presently are using the Intel DX58SO motherboard and absolutely love it, this board is designed to be overclocked, Intel ships software with it to do just that, it is still a little steep in price though and really hasnt dropped that much since i bought it in november when it first came out

Eek....mine's costing out at around 2000 USD ....and it's still 'just' the box.... I have all the other bits.

Starting with a Lian Li PC9 case ....;)

Gigabyte makes excellent motherboards.

Bugger!  My CPU (AMD Phenom II 920) alone cost more than that.... adding to that 2x2gb Corsair DDR2 800 (to go with the other 2x2gb); an AcBel 800w PSU and 1gb Galaxy 9800GT, my upgrade cost AUD$820.00.  Converting that to USD it comes to $662.70 for the 4 components, yet I read of people in the States building entire systems for USD $200 less than that.

As always, as compared to those in the US, we Aussies (particularly Queensland) are getting screwed on PC's and parts.

 At that price, I'm guessing that you're going with a low to mid-range i7, cos that's around about what I priced an upgrade with mobo, RAM and new PSU at.... never mind ROM, HDD, GPU or other components/peripherals 

The top i7 CPU itself costs between AUD$,1750 to 2,000 on its own... WELL out of my league and but just a dream.  By the time you add mobo, RAM, a decent PSU and graphics, HDD and ROM, etc, you're looking at AUD $5,000+

I just bought that motherboard two months ago and it absolutely rocks! I put a Phenom II 940 on it and 8 GB RAM with a Radeon 4850x2. It is a speed demon. I also have 3 160 GB in RAID 0 for programs and 2 500 GB in Raid 0 for data. And I got everything from Newegg. Go for it.

Agreed. I have one on my gaming computer, and it works like a charm.

VAT.....

and I hear the US is thinking about going to a Value Added Tax too now that the "make your kids pay for it" party is running things

Yup, that'd be part of the problem here... it's called GST (Good & Services Tax) and we pay 10% extra on everything except basic food items, meaning most things we buy went up in price.  However, it's not just the 10% GST that's the killer, on it's own we could probably manage that.  No, what makes it even more unpalatable is that when the Howard Government introduced the GST, all goods and services providers were essentially made tax collectors, and as a result prices were driven up even further so that companies could 'so-say' could cover their increased accounting costs.

Worse still, manufacturers/producers then began putting lesser quantities into products but still charging the same price... sometimes more because of so-called poduction cost increases. For example, most breweries reduced some bottled beers from 375mls to 330mls... food companies are doing the same, as are hardware manufacturers by cutting corners with lighter weighted steel/plastics, etc.

However, a much larger part of the PC/parts rip off situation here is excessive profiteering... particularly here in Queensland.  I searched high and low on the net for the cheapest possible prices for my upgrade components, and all the best prices were in other states (namely NSW and Victoria), which was of no help to me by the time I paid interstate S&H. Most PC/component retailers here in QLD charge anything up to 20% - 25% more than their interstate counterparts, sometime more... and it's not because they are paying more (I am reliably informed they use the same sources), but rather that they view us as a captive market with fewer options so charge more simply because they can... and can get away with it.  Excessive profiteering is why we pay more, pure and simple, and the worst offenders are the large companies who buy in bulk for much less but still charge more at the checkout than many smaller stores with limited bulk buying ablities.

I eventually found a reasonably priced local internet service with over-the-counter sales also, so by the time I had deducted what I would have paid for S&H it worked out not too much different price-wise in the end.... and I had my parts that day, took half an hour to go pick 'em up/bring 'em home.

Oh, and another thing! I could understand higher prices when the OZ dollar had fallen sharply against the greenback back in Dec 08/Jan, Feb 09, but the AUD firmed against the USD in recent months and has been trading at over 70c in the US dollar for some time, yet that saving is not being passed on to consumers.  And it's not a case of 'old stock', either.  My AMD Phenom II 920 was manufactured on 5 April 09, well after the AUD had risen against the USD, yet I paid the higher "January/February" price because the supplier had not adjusted its wholesale price to reflect this, meaning the store could not sell it to me for what should have been be the going price at the time, being that was less than what it actually paid.

And people wonder why I hate Capitalism in its purest form... it seeks to screw us.

I am not familiar with AMD systems and their respective prices, but I know gigabyte makes good stuff, I recommended a board to my friend a couple years ago from gigabyte.

Actually, I've just had a look at upping my mobo to expand my Sata ports from 4 to 6 and came up with this  GA-MA790GP- DS4H for AUD $149.95.

It's a big improvement on my current Gigabyte Ga-MA770 DS3 and I should see an improved performance of my Phenom II 920, which I've read somewhere uses the same die as the 940 and should be safely overclockable using this board to equal if not better the 940 clock speed.

Or I could go with this GA-MA790GP-UD4H one for an extra $49.95

I guess either one would do... guess it depends on having the extra $50 at the time... less 10% discount for cash

ppl give some tips to me aswell .... i'm looking to upgrade my desktop pc too .... and i want a motherboard which will be acceptable atleast for 3 years ...

Go with what I bought.  That's one of the reasons I bought it as it supports AM2+ and AM3.

I haven't built an AMD rig in years, but this looks to be a good deal and is well rated at new egg.  I'd give it a go if you want to go AMD. 

I am kinda burnt on AMD now. Last desktop I built, I spent over $400 just on the cpu and near $200 on the mobo. A few months later the cpu was 1/3 the price and the socket(939) had been discontinued. But yeah, AM3 should provide some future-proofing.

thanxx scott .... will give a look at this one ...

Yup, can't go wrong with a Gigabyte mobo... which is why I'm going with one of the two I linked to above.  For some reason I can't find a local retailer/outlet that has the GA-MA790GP-UD4P you linked to, not that it makes a lot of difference, except for perhaps in price... these have the same 790x chip and are similar in performance, etc. 

The important thing for me is that they have 2 extra SATA ports to my current board, and that means I can then run ALL SATA drives and ROMS.  At present I'm having to run 1 IDE ROM and 1 IDE HDD as I do not have the SATA ports... and I'll just swap out those SATA components from my spare rig (and vice versa) so it costs me no more than the mobo.

Yeah, I had a similar experience when I first went with AMD.  I was advised that it would be the mainstay socket for quite some time so bought a 939 socket, an AMD Athlon x2 3800+, and lived to regret it.  Just 6 months later the ASUS mobo went guts up and I couldn't get another 939 socket board anywhere... and I got no warranty/replacement joy from ASUS as they had no more in stock Instead they offered me an AM2 board.  Wasn't much use to me at the time, though, I had a 939 socket CPU and didn't have the available finances to replace it as well as the RAM to DDR2.  Bastards!!!

I had to go back to my old P4 on a Gigabyte board for a while, which is now nearing 7 years old and still running well.  Guess that's why I stick with Gigabyte, which has always been reliable... had two bad experience with ASUS and I'm not going to get burned a 3rd time.  My current Gigabyte board is still good so I'll build another rig around it using my Athlon x2 6400 and other left over parts from prior upgrades.

BTW, for anyone still with a 939 socket CPU but no mobo, ASRock now make one... see here

It's never good economy to go for the latest and greatest....but perhaps a few levels down and you don't see 'that much' of a performance hit.... assuming what you're upgrading from is ancient enough....

My current machine is a P4P800E with a P4/3.0.

I'm now a few bob poorer... but have a bunch of bits to put together.... starting with a P6Tse and an i7 920.

The whole box-and-dice came out at 2755.02 AUD [which is probably around 2200 USD]...;)

I've used several Gigabyte boards in build for myself, family and friend in the last 2 yrs.

I love everyone. I say great deal on a good quality board.

I really like Gigabytes Dual BIOS and express recovery.

if your not familiar with GB boards the dual BIOS allows you to save a BIOS copy to either a floppy or to a backup in the CMOS. make for easy backup when flashing or just plain safety.

the built in express recovery is nice too. all you have to do is leave some RAW unpartitioned space on the OS drive. If I remember right you have to boot from GB driver disk the first time, after that is like F2 or something to access, can create/restore system backups whenever you want. downfall is figuring how much raw space to leave, 20G, 50G???? how much do you want to be able to back up???? It will NOT create a backup if the raw space is not larger than the "used" space on the OS drive.

If you're really not going for the latest and greatest, you can build yourself a very stable gaming rig with 4 gigs of ram and a core duo chip, coupled with an 8800 or 9600 Nvidia graphics card for well under a grand.