GA-MA770T-UD3P layout and BIOS

As we mentioned on the previous page, in order to hit such a low price point, Gigabyte did have to make a few compromises with the design of the GA-MA770T-UD3P. The board’s PCB isn’t nearly as wide as the GA-MA790FXT-UD5P. This is good in the sense that it allows you to house the board in small cases easier, but it makes things more difficult for Gigabyte’s engineers to cram all the components on the board; they’re physically dealing with less PCB real estate due to the board’s smaller dimensions: the board is just under 8.5” wide (21cm).

As a result, the IDE connector has to be placed directly across from the SB710 South Bridge. If you recall the IDE connector is located behind the DIMM slots on the 790FX board. With the way the IDE connector is currently placed, it interfered with our GeForce GTX 295 GPU we use for testing. Either you had to swap out the IDE connector, or the GTX 295. The two couldn’t co-exist.

Fortunately this is an issue that’s isolated to the GeForce GTX 295, other dual-slot cards fit fine. This included ATI’s Radeon 4870 X2 reference board, which is also pretty long. We mention this though because next-generation DX11 GPUs are right around the corner, and we don’t know how long these cards will be.


Our other gripe with the board is the location of the ATX12V power connector. Gigabyte places it underneath the AM3 CPU socket, so you’ll have to run your ATX12V power cable across your CPU cooler. This could potentially lead to your power cable getting caught in your CPU cooler’s fan. The ideal location for the ATX12V connector is above the CPU socket.


Finally, while we didn’t encounter any issues as a result of this, we do wish Gigabyte would’ve done a better job mounting the North Bridge cooling to the AMD-770 chip. We managed to wiggle the cooler a little more than we’d like. Enthusiasts may want to pull it off and reattach it with something more permanent like a thermal glue rather than conventional thermal paste, just to make sure it has the best bond possible with the North Bridge chip.

BIOS

The BIOS implementation Gigabyte has implemented for the GA-MA770T-UD3P is very similar to their 790FX motherboard in terms of clock speeds and multipliers; in this regard everything basically carries over unchanged. The BIOS layout/interface is also a carbon copy of the GA-MA790FXT-UD5P.

Where Gigabyte does make one compromises however is in regards to voltages. One voltage setting is missing from the latest MA770T BIOS: CPU PLL voltage. Not everyone bothers to tweak the CPU’s PLL voltage though, some say it helps improve stability at high clock speeds, others don’t. In our experience, we tend to use it more frequently with Core 2 CPUs than anything else.

Fortunately this is something Gigabyte can always add to future BIOS revisions if they choose to do so. We used Gigabyte’s F2C BIOS for our testing.

GA-MA770T-UD3P BIOS Features
HyperTransport Speeds	200-500MHz in 1MHz increments
PCI Express Speeds	100-200MHz in 1MHz increments
DDR3 Memory Multipliers	4.0x, 5.33x, 6.66x, 8.0x (800-1600MHz)
HT Link Multipliers	x1-x13 (200-2600MHz)
CPU Clock Multipliers	x5.0-x35.0 in 0.5X increments
CPU NorthBridge Multiplier	x5-x20 (100-4000MHz)
DDR3 Voltages	+0.05V-+0.75V (1.65V-2.35V) in 0.05V increments
SB/HT Voltage	+0.1V, +0.2V, +0.3V
NB/PCIe/PLL Voltage Control	+0.1V, +0.2V, +0.3V
DDR VTT Voltage Control	0.8V-1.1V in 0.025V increments
CPU Voltages	-.60V - +.60V in 0.025V increments
NB Voltages	1.10V-1.60V in 0.02V increments

Overclocking

While the AMD-770 chipset officially supports AMD Overdrive, we had problems getting the latest Overdrive build (3.0.2) to run with stability on the GA-MA770T-UD3P. We’ve built two systems with this motherboard in the last 2 weeks, a Phenom II X4 955 PC and an Athlon II X2 250, both had problems OC’ing via Overdrive. For whatever reason the program simply locks up after applying your new settings. The problem is, it locks up the entire OS, prompting a complete reset and reboot. To an uninitiated user, it looks like your OC was unsuccessful and you need to crank back the settings, but even conservative OCs lead to the same problem. Therefore the only way to OC with this motherboard at this time is via BIOS.

We managed to get our Phenom II X4 955 sample stable at speeds up to 3.6GHz (18.0x200) at stock voltage. That’s not quite as high as the 3.7GHz we hit with the Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P. The AMD-770 board would boot at 3.7GHz, but wouldn’t run with complete stability in all the apps we test with.

We also couldn’t crank the HyperTransport interface as high, topping out at 226MHz.