Product Showcase

The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7

Right, there we have the motherboard which can be recognized by that new Gigabyte look and feel design wise, a nearly impossible to differentiate layout and a common feature set. That's a nice looking motherboard alright. The focus of this motherboard is that it has a dark looking design whilst remaining competitive with pricing.

We dig the two tone (black/orange) design a lot, dark colored PCBs are the trend these days. What immediately catches the eye are the sheer looks and heatsinks sitting on top of the chipset. The board has lots of features which we'll walk you through in a minute.

We received the final retail sample and as such it comes packed with a quite decent product bundle. Among the gear inside the kit you'll find the following the Motherboard 2-Way SLI Bridge and a 4-way SLI bridge,  I/O Shield SATA 6G cables Quick connector kit, Manual and  Driver CD.

This is Gigabyte's most expensive 990FX motherboard but obviously they tried hard to keep this motherboard affordable. The extras you need to seek in the overall design and components usage, which is impressive all by itself when you peek at the motherboard for the first time.

Notable features include 8x SATA connections, USB 2.0 internal headers, 6x PCIe x16 slots,

1. 2 x PCI Express x16 slots, running at x16 (PCIEX16_1, PCIEX16_2) (Note 3)
2. 2 x PCI Express x16 slots, running at x8 (PCIEX8_1, PCIEX8_2) (Note 4)
3. 2 x PCI Express x16 slots, running at x4 (PCIEX4_1, PCIEX4_2)
   (All PCI Express slots conform to the PCI Express 2.0 standard.)

Then there's a legacy PCI slot. The mobo has DDR3 1866 MHz support straight out of the BIOS. We spot socket AM3+, and also quality capacitors and solid core chokes.

Rear IO connectivity then

1. 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port
2. 1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector
3. 1 x coaxial S/PDIF Out connector
4. 1 x IEEE 1394a port
5. 7 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
6. 2 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports
7. 1 x eSATA/USB Combo connector
8. 1 x eSATA 6Gb/s connector
9. 1 x RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet port
10. 6 x audio jacks (Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out/Rear Speaker Out/Side Speaker Out/Line In/Line Out/Microphone)

7.1 audio which is managed by the Realtek ALC889 codec which supports High Definition audio up-to 7.1 channels.