DFI LP JR 790GX-M3H5 AM3 AMD 790GX HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: none

Cons: The motherboard worked for a grand total of 5 minutes, then it fried on me, I didn't touch it while it was on, didn't spill anything on it, I have the proper amount of power going to the motherboard, and when I turn it on the LED ERROR light keeps giving me a different error everytime I turn it on, it also gives me error codes that don't exist.

Other Thoughts: I would highly recommend no one get this motherboard, the technical support through the manufacturers website sucks, and I did everything they told me to do, and they won't replace it, waste of money.

Pros: Was able to oc 435 from 2.9 to 3.7 @ 1.475v on air, low to mid 20's C at idle and high 30's-low 40's C with Thermaltake Duorb in a Thermaltake Lanbox.

Northbridge ran a little to hot for my preferences on stock heatsink at 100% full load after just a couple of hours of use. It was reaching in the high 40's to low 50's C even when undervolting and disabling IGX.

Didn't unlock 4th core. Also, didn't use bios version and settings that was used by others who have unlocked cores. Check out DFI Forum, you'll find it there, there's a post on the forum from a DFI user that has a detail list of what bios version is needed for DFI motherboards.

Cons: Was updating bios and system crashed and never booted or posted after incident. Sent back for rma and got back a refund.

Other Thoughts: Decided to go with the ASRock 785g m-ATX board, but really needed the versatility from DFI. Hopefully all the bugs will be addressed for their 890 series boards because this 790gx-m3h5 was a lot of fun tweaking and undervolting while being able to still pull a decent oc out of it while it was working for me though.

Pros: Very customizeable, dual pci-e on mATX form factor, DDR3, several case fan power connectors. "Has everything" -- even some things you may not want, and extras of everything else. Though I've written an excessive amount of Cons, that is merely a forewarning to those not looking for something in this niche market. This is certainly a "specialist's" board. I've never seen a board of this form factor with this many bells and whistles.

Cons: The customization level has leaked beyond the motherboard. Many configurations that are automatic on other boards are manual and require the manipulation of pin switches -- ie. whether the computer can be woken up from USB or PS2 connectors. Another for whether you're utilizing the onboard DVI *or* HDMI -- both cannot be utilized at the same time. There is an array of pins that need to be capped in order to make the selection -- mostly irrelevant if you're using an add-on card and one monitor. As previous reviews have stated, the design of this motherboard is obviously intended for SLI video cards, however the placement of the extraneous (and mostly excessive number of) USB connectors are placed directly below where the heatsink/fan will be on most top-end graphics cards. You can "squeeze" things together, but it is incredibly inconvenient -- especially for an mATX board where things are cramped already. Oh, and I wish it had an HD-audio connector on the motherboard (optical on back).

Other Thoughts: The board I received had a capacitor fall out of the static bag without a scratch to the shipping box or the box the motherboard came in. Having to RMA a piece of equipment on the first day you receive it is never a good thing. Though I'm still anxious to receive the replacement board.

Pros: First thing i liked about this was the placement of the connections on the board, its small but DFI placed everything to where it can be easily accessed my video card doesnt smash the sata cable as it did in my previous computer. The bios settings are plentiful absolutly anything can be changed. Ive over clocked my Phenom 2 965 to 4ghz with 0 problems.

Cons: No firewire, my case has a firewire port and i had nowhere to plug it in, but i dont have anything that uses fire-wire so.....

Other Thoughts: I bought 2 of these boards so far and if i build another HTPC for anyone ill buy another.

Pros: Tweakers delite! Solid platfrom for overclocking. Solid capacitors all around. CPU capacitors twice the size of my old Biostar TA785G3 which helps supply more and consistent power to cpu meaning higher overclocking. Allowed for extra 200mhz oc better than old mobo on Phenom 955c3. Two PCIe for second 5850 thats on the way. 6 or 7 fan connections with adjustments in BIOS. Boots thru RAID controller setup faster than old board. Decent NB heatsink nice MOSFET heatsink easily screw/ed(newegg thought it was offensive??) a stock AMD HSFan to both temps stay 33c idle 40c max. RAM slots are close but didnt get in the way of zerothermBTW90 only bay 1/4 inch. Came as open box missing nothing to my knowledge.

Cons: Its not a novice board I can see why Ive seen so many of these open boxed thats what i got. For starters it will not boot from anything if no flobby drive is connected you must disable floppy in bios to boot from whatever your booting from. It automatically trys to OC on your first boot you must hit ecs to stop. Sometimes wont restart from windows hangs once windows shuts down and it should be loading bios. Reloads some old OC file from bios when i hit a bsod not my oc but someone elses from previous owner. NB runs hot without some good air flow over it 50c.

Other Thoughts: Any and all cons I have listed im sure to resolve with some research its just not a idiot proof mobo though it trys to be but fails. All in all I like it cause I like tweaking. It losses and egg for poor execution of auto clock idiot proof but tweeker mix. If its a tweeker board leave it a tweakers board dont try and do it for us DFI.

Pros: This motherboard's timings are absolutely customizable in every aspect possible. The Manual for the JR is not as comprehensive as the DK model which has the same settings.

It is indeed a cramp motherboard, however being MicroATX this is expected. Only one of the extra USB headers is available to me, when using a Sapphire HD5770 Vapor-X

The only low height (less then 76mm) cooler that would fit on that motherboard was the Zalman CNPS8700 NT. Works great with my AMD Athlon II X4 630

This motherboard is for folks who know what they are doing, I strongly recommend reading on the DFI Club forums about the LP DK 790FXB-M3H5, they use similar options, jumper settings and bios options.

Loading optimized bios values gets you started right from the get go, from which you work from.

Cons: The placement of the extra USB headers.

Pros: -MATX
-2 Pci express slots (CROSSFIRE!)
-Went together without a hitch

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: -I had to set my ram timings manually or else my pc wouldn't restart.

-I don't overclock or know much about overclocking but this board has been fine for me.

Antec NSK3480
Amd Phenom II 965
DFI Lanparty Jr. 790GX M3H5
Corsair 650w HX Modular
GSKILL 10600 4GB DDR3 8-8-8-21
Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB
2X5770's in Crossfire
Antec 92mm fans

Pros: so far nothing

Cons: DOA

Other Thoughts: This board was dead when I got it, then dealing with the RMA thier service has been very poor. The first person I talked to did not even speak english at all. I am very unhappy with DFI as a company and will never buy from them again.

Pros: This is my third Lan Party board and it is very capable. The BIOS is heavily modifiable and the board quality is good. All of the board support holes are correctly located (seems minor until you get a board that's off).

I've got an AM3+ CPU (Athlon II x4 620) and 6 gigs of 1600 RAM running smoothly. My graphics card came busted, so the onboard Radeon 3300 came in handy.

The 7.1 Realtek audio sounds good and the Marvell gigabit LAN works well.

There are plenty of internal connections for front audio connections, front panel USB slots, internal USB devices, etc. Some are poorly placed, however.

The LED POST codes are useful.

Finally, the drivers for this board, even on DFI's website, are horribly out of date. Download drivers from AMD, Realtek, and Marvell directly and you won't have a problem.

Cons: This card is picky about where you place your RAM. It wants RAM loaded in the two slots closest to the CPU before the other two banks are populated. Beware that a giant heatsink might not fit or might need to be modified to fit.

I found that my computer would not go into the BIOS with the memory in the "incorrect" slots, but I also found that one of my sticks was bad. Therefore, I do not know if this behavior was from the bad stick or the board.

There's only one LAN adapter. My old DFI boards have had two different brands on one board, so if one fails, there's another available. It's not really necessary, but it would be a nice feature to have.

Some pinouts are poorly placed, like some USB connections between the pci-e slots. I plugged in an internal card reader there and the cables are mashed flat, but they don't seem to be pinched.

This is a Micro ATX board. You're likely not going to have the room to Crossfire two graphics boards.

Other Thoughts: To those that get '88' errors: '88' is the pre-POST code, and isn't really a code as much as it is a LED self test. You will see code '88' and no POST if you forget to plug in the additional 8-Pin connector, and it's kinda hidden by the Northbridge Heatsink.

If your computer throws "Memory Management" errors, try changing the memory slots and changing the memory type from Unganged to Ganged in the BIOS, even if you have 3 memory sticks.

Also, be sure to disable your internal graphics in the BIOS if you're not using it. You're wasting memory if you don't.

Pros: Board recognized everything with first boot after adjusting recommended manf settings with hardware, played with it a little bit and couldn't reboot, got 88 post code readout, cleared cmos and used manufacturer recc's and booted successfully every time.

amd m-atx +
am3 ddr3 1600 ++
crossfire ready dual pci-e 16 geb 2.0 +++

This board's INSANELY CRAZY!!!

Future proof with "Thuban" AMD AM3 X6 CPU and will be adding a 2ND ATI GPU to it for a Supercharged NOS Supercomputer....

I'm VERY, VERY, VERY Ecstatic that our board finally arrived after a couple of times of receiving the wrong item.

Newegg's online and phone service are Eggcellent and 2nd to none. They handled all of our matters promptly and proficiently.

This board takes a little work, which my 10yo son was mad to get his hands on...We walked through the instruction manuals and entered recommended specs during setup and installing windows 7 had some little trouble spots but that was not a hardware issue at all.

Cons: None. Haven't tried to unlock cores.....yet

buying a prebuilt mass produced rig again would of been easy, but I wanted to experience and appreciate with building our first high-end build together.

Our families glad that I chose this board over other micro boards out there.

Board recognized everything with first boot after adjusting recommended manf settings with hardware, played with it a little bit and couldn't reboot, got 88 post code readout, cleared cmos and used manufacturer recc's and booted successfully every time. So it's really not a con at all to say the least....

Other Thoughts: Adding a water cooling system from a local company produced for Koolance. Needed some mods to our case to fit current and future video cards.

However, changing to water cooling wiith an external cooling unit will make things a lot more easier when having the cooling blocks inside the case instead of having a bulky cpu heatsink and larger gpu housing.

Our system just rocks, rocks, rocks & rolls, rolls rolls...

System:

Sapphire hd5970 2gb gpu
AMD am3 435 x3 2.9ghz cpu/Thermaltake du-orb 80mm fan & heatsink
DFI lp jr 790gx-m3h5 mobo
OCZ amd be 8gb ddr3 1600 8-8-8-24 memory
OCZ vertex series 30gb boot drive ssd
Hitachi hd31000 1tb hdd
LG 8x bd-rom odd
Silverstone st85f-p 850w modular psu
Silverstone pp05 short modular power cables
Thermaltake vf1000bws m-atx lanbox w/handle pc case
Samsung lcd 32" 720p 60hz

Will be adding x6 cpu + hd 5970 a little while after x6 availability.

GOOOOO THUBAN!

Yes, Sir, Ry, I shure dun my humwerck lol :}}}} hehehee