The Box, The Board
Ok lets take a look at the 990FXA-UD5 box and see what there is to be seen.
It’s a box! It lists many of the features we read about on the previous page.
The rear has yet more of them. All in all it’s a fairly informative box. Opening this box we find a white box, no need for a picture there. Opening that box, we find accessories!
Two bags of two SATA cables, a long SLI cable and a 3way SLI cable, plus two manuals, a driver cd, and the rear IO plate. I’d like to see a USB3 riser to get the two extra ports the mobo supports out onto the rear panel, as well as a Crossfire cable Oh well.
Now lets look at the board itself.
There’s a fair amount going on here! The first thing to note is that the ram is well back from the CPU socket, large coolers shouldn’t be too much of an issue here.
There is good access to the ATX24p connector as well as the EPS12v CPU power connector.
There are six SATA3 (6gbps) ports and two SATA2 ports, all aimed off to the side for easy cable management. Along the left side (in this picture, at least) we can see lots of USB headers, the front panel connectors, a SATA3 connector, and a COM port connector. We’ll look more closely in a moment.
The CPU VRM heatsink and northbridge heatsink are linked by a heatpipe, while the southbridge heatsink is a standalone affair. The VRM and NB heatsinks are decently sized, not huge but they should be large enough.
The SB sink is fairly massive and ought to be plenty, generally southbridges run fairly cool.
Internal IO ports, we’ve got a front audio header, an IEEE1394 header, a COM header, three USB port headers (one with 3x power), and USB3 header.
The IEEE1394 header gets a cap, as you can plug a USB header into it and destroy both the IEEE1394 controller and the USB device. Don’t do that.
Moving around to the rear of the board there are all sorts of ports, putting the IO shield in place will make it easier to figure out what is what.
There we go, everything is nicely labeled, almost all the USB ports can supply 1.5 amps rather than the standard half amp, definitely a plus for charging iPods/iPads and the like. Not so good in a semi-short circuit situation. Generally speaking a short will draw over 1.5a and pop the fuse/breaker anyway though.
The blue USB ports are USB3, I’m not sure why one eSATA3 has a red connector and the other has a blue one, if I had to guess I’d say it was simply what was in stock at the time.
Over on the left is a PS/2 keyboard/mouse plug, something I very much like to see as sometimes Windows will fail to load USB drivers during the install process and leave you wondering how on earth you’re supposed to push “ok” with no mouse and no keyboard.
There’s also an Ethernet port and a IEEE1394 port, along with six ports for audio plus a SPDIF optical audio output. Lots going on back here.
Completing the IO tour we have the SATA ports, the six on the left are SATA3 (6gbps), the two on the right are SATA2 (3gbps).
Lots of PCIe slots as well!
No fewer than six of the suckers, one 1x slot, two 16x slots, an 8x and two 4x. The two 16x slots can be populated without sharing any lanes, but if you put a card in the 8x slot the second 16x slot turns into an 8x slot. Still, 16x8x8x crossfire/SLI is quite good really, you won’t find any better.
Off on the far left is a lone PCI slot for people still using legacy hardware. Now we’ll look in the CPU socket area and see what can be found!
