Gigabyte 990 FXA-UD7 review

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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; is backwards compatible with Phenom II and Athlon II series AM3 processors. This was a much discussed feature on the past months in our forums alright. Today we'll prove 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.

We expect Bulldozer (Zambezi family) series processors to arrive as late as August, maybe even September. To get an idea of what you might expect, here's an overview (* compilation courtesy DigiTimes):

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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. To start off this release on the 990FX chipset launch day we have prepared a nice review with the help of Gigabyte. They were the first to submit a 990FX motherboard which includes all the hippest gear like support for USB 3 and sure, SATA 3 (6G).

The Gigabyte 990FX series UD7 is what we'll be placing under our microscope today, styled in black and orange with the coolest look ever. This AM3+ motherboard will be powered by a 10-phase VRM design. It comes with four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting DDR3 allowing to be clocked to 1866 MHz. You'll spot seven card slots of which are six PCI-Express 2.0 x16 supporting NVIDIA Quad SLI and AMD CrossFireX.
Two of these slots are x4, the rest would be x8 when you use four of them. Also a legacy PCI slot can be found.

Storage is eight internal SATA 6 Gb/s ports, six from the SB850 Southbridge, and two from a third-party controller. There are two eSATA ports, other then that, that is a great looking motherboard.

So an interesting fact is that this motherboard series now is 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.

Gigabyte 990FXA UD9

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