Let’s look at the board in more detail. The first area to focus on is the CPU socket. The 990FX Professional makes use of a V12+2 power phase design and Digital PWM to deliver a solid voltage to the CPU, even under overclocking. Having a 12+2 power phase puts the board firmly apart from the competition, that typically sport 8+2 phases for the AM3+ platform, including the GIGABYTE flagship, the 990FXA-UD7 that we looked at last week. This should give the board serious overclocking potential, which we will explore later in this review. As a side note, however, it was felt that this board was not nearly as weighty as the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7, possibly attributed to the extra copper used in the PCB and larger cooling solution of the UD7.

The CPU socket itself is the regular AM3+ design, with no surprises here. There is plenty of clearance for CPU coolers as well as large graphics cards, as the top most expansion slot is only PCI-E 1x.




Like other 990FX boards, the 990FX Professional is equipped with 4x DIMM slots for dual channel configuration of DDR3 memory of frequencies from 800MHz to 2100MHz (OC). There is also a maximum capacity of 32GB. We can also see the 24-pin ATX power connector in a standard fashion (as opposed to right-angled) as well as two ports for front panel USB3.0 – i.e. up to 4 physical ports.




The board comes with 6x SATA III ports, all provided by the AMD SB950 southbridge, which are capable of RAID 0, 1, 0+1, JBOD, and RAID 5. There is a 3rd party solution for the two rear eSATA connections, but no additional internal SATA ports.




The board is also equipped with power and reset buttons, as well as an LED debug feature that allows you to check the status of POST and and if there is an error, possibly see why the PC may not be booting correctly. Welcome additions and they sit next to the large southbridge heatsink with the Fatal1ty logo on top.




Moving onto the bottom of the board, we can see the front panel connections, which include two USB2.0 connections (for four ports), the usual array of power LEDs, switches etc (located in the middle as opposed to the right side), a COM port, IR port, firewire, and HD audio. There are also two of the 6 fan headers here, with 2 PWM and 4 DC type. The power and reset buttons light up in blood red when the motherboard is booted, but can be turned off in the BIOS if required.




There is ample support for PCI-E configurations as well as legacy PCI devices, with two PCI slots and 3x PCI-E 16x slots (two are 16x/16x, other is 4x) and two PCI-E 1x slots. This allows for up to three way Crossfire and SLI (or 4-way if you have dual GPU cards of course). No PCI-E 3.0 support, but this is not expected to come on the Scorpius platform at any point, and we’re likely for a bit of a longer wait before that’s an option on AMD setups. However, with no PCI-E 3.0 GPUs yet, this is not at all important. The inclusion of two legacy PCI slots on this board is rare for a high end model, so may differentiate it from the crowd, especially if you’re running a sound card and TV tuner, for example.




With regards to IO ports, the 990FX professional has a pleasing amount of connectivity. Here’s a breakdown, going from top left to bottom right:

• PS/2 mouse
• PS/2 keyboard
• Clear CMOS button
• Coaxial digital audio
• SPDIF digital audio
• Gigabit Ethernet
• 2x USB2.0
• 2x USB2.0
• eSATA
• 2x USB2.0
• Fatal1ty USB mouse port
• USB2.0
• Firewire
• eSATA
• Gigabit Ethernet #2
• 2x USB3.0
• 7.1 analogue audio