GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 AMD 990FX Review

👤by Alex Hull Comments 📅12-08-11
Packaging and first look

The first thing to notice about the outer packaging of the 990FXA-UD7 is the size. Although it’s presented in the regular fashion for GIGABYTE motherboards, the box is significantly deeper to accommodate the accessories, as you will see further down this page. This is more or less in keeping with the other high-end motherboards of its type. GIGABYTE makes a clear point to show almost all the features and logos on the front of the box, making it somewhat crowded, but informative. I doubt that many of the potential buyers of a high end product such as this need all the features right in their face, but there they are. If you’re confused about some of the badges and logos on the box and what they actually mean, you’re not alone, and so in this review I’ll also outline what on earth GIGABYTE are talking about when they say ‘333 Onboard acceleration’ and ‘Ultra Durable 3’ to name just two. Note that one of the badges on the bottom left of the top of the box is the AMD FX logo, showing that this board will be compatible with the 32nm ‘Zambezi’ AMD FX CPUs on release later this year. Exciting stuff.


GIGABYTE are keen to make sure you’re aware of the features


On opening the front of the box, you’re greeted to a small peek of the motherboard itself, as well as another less than subtle bombardment of features from the opposite side. There are also good image showing the cooling solutions and CPU socket and the black and bronze design.


A small glimpse of the board


The 990FXA-UD7 is bundled with a fairly small number of additional accessories, but caters for almost all needs. With the main board, you also will receive:
-IO backplate
-Manuals
-GIGABYTE and Dolby Home Theater case stickers
-Driver and software DVD
-2x black SATA cables
-2x black right-angled SATA cables
-4-way SLI bridge
-3-way SLI bridge
-Flexible SLI Bridge
-2x flexible Crossfire bridges


A moderate bundle centred on multi-GPU configurations


Having taken the motherboard out of the box, you can see it in all its glory. The most obvious thing to note is the black PCB, a welcome design change from the blue PCBs that we’re accustomed to seeing from GIGABYTE. Black just looks a lot better installed into a case, especially with black internals. Secondly, the heatsink design is the next most obvious aspect with a gun metal finish with bronze/copper highlights. The cooling solution is fairly sizeable to accommodate the 8+2 power phase design, and it is linked by heatpipes to the low profile heatsink over the AMD SB950 southbridge. Other noteable features include the AM3+ ‘Black Socket’, and the 7 full size expansion slots, which is more than we usually see on ATX motherboards. In fact, although this board is listed as ATX, in actuality the dimensions make it slightly wider than a Standard ATX size, but still smaller than Extended ATX. An extra ~2cm of width puts it somewhere between the two. Couple this with the right angled SATA connections and you’re going to have to check clearance in your Standard ATX case before considering purchasing.
As you can also see, this board has a full complement of solid capacitors (as is becoming the standard across the whole range now) as well as quite a packed PCB, part of the reason for the extra width. Let’s take a look at the boards many features in more detail.


An overview of the motherboard



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