A press release tossed from AMD's PR department hit the news stream lately, announcing the arrival of the company's latest high-powered integrated graphics board for the AMD Phenom line. The 790GX, while still basically a 780G, manages modern AM2, AM2+ Phenom support up to 3.2 GHz at significantly higher clock rates and gets paired with an ATI Radeon HD 3300.

The 55-nm chip comes clocked at a whopping 700 MHz frequency (up 200 MHz from the 780G), though like the 780G, it's Hybrid Crossfire support is hampered by a twp-way x8 PCI-E bus width. 

Luckily, the communication across the 16-lane bandwidth is at PCI-E 2.0 standards, so less worries. CrossFire options are also split into two choices only: a Radeon HD 2400-based card or a Radeon HD 3400-based discrete graphics option.

Being that as it may, however, the driver optimizations introduced in the latest beta of the Catalyst driver set pumped more juice out of the 790GX setup.

That's not to say that the board's architecture was already pretty accommodating to high-end HD 3400s such as the Radeon HD 3470. The introduction of the Performance Cache and the Radeon HD 3300 in the board can lift a 3470 to the highs of an HD 3650.

The Radeon HD 3300 itself is a shy improvement as well. It's not only DX10, SM 4.0-staple hardware, but it also includes 30 stream processors via a two shader single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) setup.

MSAA support is hardware tapped to a max of 4 samples, while in-HDR support is present in all AA modes. We doubt this will be an oft-used configuration for gamers on a budget, however, since performance is just as important as quality.

AMD claims that the chip ships this week, and it appears that board manufacturers have begun taking their SKUs to market. Check with your favorite brand to see what they've lined up for your target price range.

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