The 790GX chipset from AMD might not have been officially launched as yet, but we've scored the first Hybrid CrossFireX benchmark numbers on a 790GX based motherboard. The board in question is the GA-MA790GP-DS4H from Gigabyte which we wrote a little bit about here.

It features 128MB of GDDR3 side port memory and it was paired up with a Radeon HD 3470 graphics card for some Hybrid CrossFireX benchmarking action. The processor was a Phenom 9850 which was overclocked to 3,362MHz on a 249MHz bus. The system also had 2GB of DDR2 memory of an unknown speed.

The 3DMark06 score ended up at 4,666 points which has to be considered quite good for this kind of a combination. the SM 2.0 score stood at 1,584, with the HDR/SM 3.0 score at 1,807 and the CPU score at 4,364. The test was run at 1,280x1,024 resolution.

It's early days yet and Gigabyte might be able to tweak a bit more performance out of this board and with the help of new drivers from AMD, it might get even better. It looks like Hybrid CrossFireX might not be a terrible solution after all, although the question is if it'll be worth the extra cost over getting a decent graphics card in the first place.