So I have some questions about the 790gx w/ sb700

what is this talk of side board memory to boost buffer rates? What is that?

Also it was supposed to be out by end of July (it's august now) and I'm rather anxious

Are there any other cool features in the 790gx that are limited to just AMD, 4850, 4970 (i saw somehwere that in idle the phenoem chips use less voltage, as well as the a certain gpu consumes less power)

i am just trying to get facts straight thanks!

*bump*

Sideport(side board) memory is a dedicated graphics buffer, think it works a bit like normal graphics memory. The sideport memory is faster than normal ram and should boost performance of the onboard GPU, ATI/AMD says it will improve GPU performance by about 10%. Most IGP chipsets dont have onboard memory for the GPU and use the system ram as framebuffer.

780G chipset also have a sideport memory option, but its not used by most mainboard makers, all 790GX boards will have sideport memory as far as i know.

I think the 790GX is a very good upgrade path for people with old (3-4 years or older) pc's, it can be used playing games like World of warcraft at about 1280X1024 resolution. The gpu is faster than most 3-4 year old graphicscards, its not fast enough for new games( crysis and similar ).

Reason i think is so good is that it dont use alot of electrical power and may be used straight away without having to replace powersupply or enclosure( provided board isnt not too large ). It can be used for a GPU/CPU upgrade later on, most boards will have crossfire support for both 2 standalone graphics cards and hybrid crossfire( slow/ low powerdraw crossfire for the onboard gpu). Most 790GX boards will come with SB750 southbridge that supports RAID5 and have more extras than the SB700.

Only "bad" thing is that you have to use AMD cpu's which are slower than Intel ones, but also cheaper.

Hope this answered your question, and no im not a AMD marketing person, i love these chipsets (780G and 790GX)