GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7 (rev. 1.x) Pro Reviews

I have had the advantage of owning this board for months now and as your classic "enthusiast," I have really loaded it up and put it through its paces. I have ran triple and quad Crossfire, heavily overclocked it, and used it for gaming as well as massive resource intensive multitasking and it has performed flawlessly.The attributes of the quality components and PCB design have kept it cool running and have eliminated heat as an overclocking restriction or concern. The layout of the board has been well thought out with no interference issues you inexplicably run into on some motherboards even today. With six PCIe slots and support for quad SLI or Crossfire, up to 16 USB ports, eight SATA 6Gb/s connectors, and a BIOS that relinquishes complete control to the power user, the UD7 just screams of possibility for those want to get the most from their octo-core Bulldozer. The looks of the UD7 are a definite plus as well. The black on black board with tasteful gold aluminum accents was designed with side windows in mind. It is sophisticated and accented without being gaudy or resorting to gimmicky trinkets for heatsinks.

All said and done, the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 is a niche board that caters for the enthusiast who absolutely needs the utmost component flexibility - from four graphics cards to super-clocked CPUs - though, given what we know about the FX chip, we recommend most users look further down the stack for value-orientated boards such as the UD5 and UD3.

The next mainboard on our list, Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7, turned out an even bigger disappointment at this point. The parameters you really need are missing in the mainboard BIOS. Instead you have a bunch of parameters you don’t really need, which do not help the CPU and prevent you from increasing the memory clock frequency. It is hard to change anything, because you can’t always access the BIOS. The board is of larger size, which imposes certain compatibility restrictions, but it is still difficult to remove the graphics card. There are only four fan connectors onboard, and there is only one other fan besides the CPU one that allows you to adjust its rotation speed. This mainboard will be good for those who intend to build a four-way graphics configuration. However, if you want to really use this graphics configuration to the utmost of its potential, you will need a high-speed CPU, and the board can only lower its frequency below the nominal.

We have mixed feelings toward the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7. Out of the box, and before doing any formal testing, we initially experienced some random instability with the board. Clearing the CMOS, flashing to the latest BIOS, and doing a clean OS install prior to testing resolved the issues and the board was rock solid afterward, but there are some other things that hold it back in light of competing products. While we like the overall look of the board, the complete lack of color coding could be confusing for less experienced builders. The board's older BIOS utility seems antiquated next to newer UEFI utilities and the 990FXA-UD7 is the most expensive board of the bunch at around $250. The Gigabyte 990FX-UD7 is nice, but considering its price, there are more compelling options currently available.

With its wealth of PCI Express slots, the GA-990FXA-UD7 is well-equipped for heavy-duty expansion, but it also manages to keep support for legacy technology such as PCI cards and PS/2 input devices, as well. With loads of internal SATA 6Gbps ports and eSATA ports, too, the board will also allow you to connect a massive amount of storage, should you already own a brace of hard drives or solid-state drives. AMD's CPU designs may not be able to keep up with Intel’s fastest from a pure-performance standpoint, but the chipsets for the latest AMD chips are far more progressive on the storage front. The all-6Gbps collection of SATA ports on the GA-990FXA-UD7 makes the quartet of 3Gbps ports on Intel’s “cutting edge” X79 motherboards look limp in comparison. In many respects, the Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 is similar to competing AM3+ boards. But with its support for up to four-way SLI and CrossFireX, it’s an excellent choice if you plan to build an extreme gaming PC that’s stacked to the max with high-end graphics cards.

s expected the latest AMD 990FX/SB950 shows no significant performance gain over the last generation chipset from AMD (890FX/SB850). The new chipset is essentially identical except it offers native support for Bulldozer and NVIDIA SLI. While we are disappointed that there is not a major update to the new chipset, especially with the lack of native USB 3.0, we are at least glad to see that AMD still continues with its backward compatibility support. At the moment there is really no need to upgrade to a 990FX chipset based board if you have an 890FX chipset board unless you are looking to run SLI on your board. However, if you have an older AMD AM2+/AM3 board that lacks SATA 3.0 support and wish to upgrade to a newer board, the 990FX is definitely worth checking out especially, with Bulldozer around the corner.

The overall performance of the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 wasn't far off the competitor today. What really sold us on the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 was the overclocking! We have previously been unable to POST past 4.6GHz on our AMD FX-8150, on the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 we were able to boot into Windows 7 at 4.9GHz with all of the cores active!

So, if you've got around £200 to spend on a motherboard, and you want a high bang for buck ratio, the bucks, if you can chuck in the extra few, must go to the Gigabyte board. The Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 justifies its price tag with its performance, tons of ports and four-way SLI.

The UD7 is a monster in some ways and a weakling in others. It has a packed PCB, which sports useful features such as power and reset switches, and it’s also able to cater for the craziest of SLI or CrossFireX setups. While it uses a BIOS rather than an EFI, it was also more pleasant to overclock than the ASRock 890FX Deluxe5 or the MSI 990FXA-GD80.

Gigabyte seemingly has put the 990FXA-UD7 motherboard on the market that has a lot of issues. You really need to read through the review to understand why. As it stands, there is no way we can suggest you purchase this motherboard. AMD needs to worried as well as this is the kind of product leading the charge for its late to the party Bulldozer/Zambezi.

Gigabyte stepped up to the plate and knocked out a home run. This board features everything that an enthusiast should be looking for with their next board. The features read like an enthusiast wish list. They took an otherwise small improvement and turned it into something amazing. This board really does stand out amongst the competition. The real question is will this board compete with the Intel Sandy Bridge offerings? Well only AMD can answer that question. It really is up to their new Bulldozer processors. Gigabyte has given them a great board with witch to stage their battle against Intel. They really don’t have a better option at this time. And come to think of it neither do you.