Verdict and Conclusion
I was excited to see what Gigabyte had done with AMD’s new 990FX chipset for Bulldozer AM3+ CPUs, the entire Bulldozer architecture is fascinating, and Gigabyte usually does a good job supporting new chipsets and CPUs and getting top level motherboards out quickly.
Priced at $190 it’s fairly close to the top of the pile price wise, it’s not the most expensive though, you can spend $240 on an AM3+ motherboard if you feel like it. I would say that the price is about right, as there are plenty of features on this board worth paying for.
This Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 motherboard is excellent physically, the layout leaves plenty of room for cable management, as well as for fingers to get in to plug/unplug the EPS12V CPU power connector.
The board looks excellent and has effectively sized heatsinks as well.
Beyond that, supporting three way Crossfire-X and SLI is excellent!
Unfortunately the board has some issues it’s BIOS, while there are some BIOS features I like quite a bit, like having the CPU settings and basic memory settings and voltage settings all on one page (and the advanced memory accessible directly from that page). That is excellent! Putting some CPU features in the Advanced BIOS Features section is an odd choice, but doesn’t put a major dent in the rating.
The offset type cpu/cpuNB voltage adjustment and oversized vcore bump with “Core Performance Boost” enabled (which it is by default!) are issues, how serious they are depends on what you’re planning on doing with the board, and how experienced you are. Turning the CPB option off fixes the largest issues quite easily, it would be nice if the BIOS set it that way in the defaults.
Lastly, I was impressed that it worked straight out of the box with Linux Mint 11, usually a brand new motherboard and platform requires some fiddling. In this case both AMD and Gigabyte must have worked with the Linux developers to make it painless to install and use Linux. This is totally irrelevant to some people, and fantastic for others. For me, it’s fantastic!
To summarize, there are PROS:
- Board layout is excellent.
- Nicely sized heatsinks keep important parts cool.
- Lots of USB ports.
- Lots of SATA3 6gbps ports.
- Good voltage regulation and ripple control.
- Price is a solid value if the board is right for you.
- Excellent support in modern Linux
The world not being perfect, there are cons too:
- Only two USB3 ports without buying an additional header.
- No power/reset/clear-CMOS buttons.
- CPU features in multiple BIOS locations.
- “CPB” adds a lot of vcore and is enabled by default.
The bottom line is that the physical motherboard itself is excellent, all it needs is a USB3 header in the box and power/reset buttons and it would be nearly perfect.
Anyway, given all of the above, the by and large excellent physical motherboard and the somewhat dubious BIOS, I’m giving the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 a score of 8.7/10 and a Recommended badge.
SCORE
8.7/10
