Memory performance
The Phenom's integrated memory controller largely takes the motherboard out of the equation when it comes to memory subsystem performance. However, motherboard makers do have some freedom when it comes to tuning the CPU's memory controller.

There's virtually no difference in the memory bandwidth available to each board. The Platinum does lag behind the Gigabyte board by just over two nanoseconds in our memory latency test, though.

Motherboards don't always play nice when all of their DIMM slots are populated, so we popped a couple of extra memory modules into each board to see how they fared. Unfortunately, neither was able to overcome the Phenom II's lack of official support for more than one DIMM per channel at 1066MHz, so we had to back off the memory speed to 800MHz on each board. For what it's worth, the Gigabyte board refused to post with four DIMMs at 1066MHz. The MSI posted, but then spat up a blue screen on the way to Windows.

Again, we see little difference in available memory bandwidth between the two boards. The DKA790GX continues to trail the Gigabyte in our memory latency test, though, this time by a little less than two nanoseconds.

STARS Euler3d computational fluid dynamics
Few folks run fluid dynamics simulations on their desktops, but we've found this multi-threaded test to be particularly demanding of memory subsystems, making it a good link between our memory and application performance tests.

Despite a slightly more sluggish memory access latency, the Platinum edges out the DS4H in our fluid dynamics benchmark.