An Overview

An Overview

So, in the mid-range to high-end AMD segment you'll spot the AMD 990FX chipset motherboards. These motherboards will be based on Socket AM3+, and let me immediately make it very clear; it is backwards compatible with Phenom II and Athlon II series AM3 processors. This was a much discussed feature over the past months in our forums alright. We'll show you that Phenom II works excellently on Socket AM3+ as the six and eight-core Bulldozer processors that should go alongside this motherboard have not yet been announced and thus have not yet been launched.

So for now you can at the very least focus on the 990FX chipset, which can be used with the last generation Phenom II X4 and X6 processors. The 990FX motherboards include all the hippest gear like support for USB 3 and sure, SATA 3 (6G).

The 990FX series from ECS is what we'll be placing under our microscope today, styled in black, grey and white with a hip look. This AM3+ motherboard will be powered by a 8+2-phase VRM design. It comes with four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting DDR3 clocked to 2133 MHz. You'll spot six card slots of which three are PCI-Express 2.0 gen2 x16 supporting NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFireX.
Then there are two x1 gen 1 slots and a legacy PCI slot can also be found.

Storage is provided via six internal SATA 6 Gb/s ports; six SATA ports from the SB950 Southbridge, and two from a third-party Marvel 9128 controller for two eSATA ports. In case you think you have a flashback, correct... there's also a traditional IDE port available.

So an interesting fact is that this motherboard series is now SLI compatible, something that was not possible in the past as NVIDIA blocked this at driver level. It is good to see that opened up.