today I will be unboxing the 990 fx8 ud7
this is a truly high-end 990 FX board
from Gigabyte features a bucket load of features including unlocked performance
that is to say it is compatible with the upcoming unlocked FX chips from AMD it
features full support for AMD Crossfire X NVIDIA SLI
oh man rocket give it a
rest so I guess he just needed attention
isn't that right rocket are you done bothering us
now okay here you go there you go
sweetheart off he goes all right so uh
yes AMD Crossfire X NVIDIA SLI 333
onboard acceleration that is USB 3 SATA 3 and three times USB power for
additional power through us B hubs or charging higher powered devices Ultra
durable 3 3year warranty and 8 plus2 phase
power okay moving along to the inside we see a window through to the motherboard
we see some glamour shots of the motherboard itself we see it features
driver mosfets and what else we got over here so we've got support for four-way
SLI and four-way Crossfire now there's a
cool feature dual BIOS which means if you corrupt your BIOS during flashing
you can restore it using another physical BIOS chip and hyfi technology
giving you support for 3 tbte plus uh
hard drives we have a debug LED for diagnosing boot problems as well as a
couple of other things here including onoff charging for your USB devices with
one of the front USB headers on the back
we see pretty much the same stuff that we were looking at on the
inside so let's go ahead and open this
bad boy up
all right now we see the window is huh that's kind of funny the window is small
here but it's full size here someone who
was designing the inner carton of the packaging was not talking to the guy who
was designing the outer carton of the packaging who thinks I could be wrong
though it's happened before all right let's have a look at what we've got in
terms of accessories we have a Gigabyte 3-way SLI Bridge which is black very
nice I hate seeing a black PCB gorgeous looking motherboard coming with a like a
blue three-way s Bridge all right we have two right angle and two straight
say to three cables we have a crossfire Bridge a four-way oh a
black very nice black four-way SLI bridge and another Crossfire Bridge okay
so we have oh yeah there it is there's a two-way SLI Bridge all of these are
black all of them are very very nice looking that's uh very good to see I
hate mismatched mismatched three-way and four-way SLI Bridges because you go and
build a high-end system and then you put a eyes sore on it that doesn't happen
very often colorcoded rear IO Shield we
have a users manual with driver DVD throw that away download the latest from
the Gigabyte website multilingual installation guide book a Gigabyte
sticker and a Dolby Digital home theater
sticker let's go ahead and close that up and have a look at the motherboard
itself so the last ud7 board from Gigabyte was an XL ATX form factor and
it looks like they have actually gotten away from that with this iteration which
I think is probably a move for in the
right direction so let's have a look at the you know what I'll do my usual thing
and then I'll go back and look at some of the things that are special about this board so here's our socket am3 plus
which supports all of your standard am2 am3 am3 plus CPU heat sinks as long as
it supports the wattage being output by the CPU then you should be fine and this
is interesting these are labeled coupon
coupon 2 three and four those look like voltage readouts but
uh fascinating so if anyone knows what the coupon those four coupon things are
let me know I think maybe they mean CPU I got nothing okay guys uh the eight
pin power connector in its top is in its ideal location in the top left of the
board we've got our very nice heat pipe
connected chipset and um mosfet cooling
solution going on here so top chipsets here bottom chipsets here we used to
call them North Bridge South Bridge now they're not and then the mosfets are
here moving along to the right hand edge of the board we find our 24 pin
connector in its ideal location we find power reset and clear seos buttons in a
way better than usual location for onboard connectors down here is all fine
and good until you install a PCI Express graphics card near the bottom of the
board and then you can't reach it anymore so this is very smart Gigabyte
has said oh we're going to design a board that's going to have up to four graphics cards in it let's make it so
you can actually put four graphics cards in it and still access the features good
on your Gigabyte all right we've got auxiliary
power for our graphics cards here so you
can plug in additional SATA connector love seeing this as a SATA connector
rather than a PCIe or a Molex connector
because you're bound to have more extra SATA connectors than PCIe connectors if
you go and install four graphics cards am I right okay we've got gigabits G
Gigabyte SATA 36 gbit per second ports here so those are running off a third
party controller then we have SATA 3 6 GB per second ports here oh oh oh okay
right so we've got eight total SATA 3 6 gbit per second ports these six are
running off the AMD chipset these two are running off a Gigabyte third party
chipset here is our debug LED here are
our front panel connectors here is our front USB 3.0 front USB 2 that's the
extra power one you can tell from the red background two front USB 2.0 front
fire wire and front panel audio headers
are available in terms of our PCIe layout we've got a very Advanced looking
PCI layout here so here's a 16x slot here's another 16x slot so if
you're installing two cards those are your guys right there those are the ones
you want to use we've got a 4X slot this is pretty much not intended to be used
because it's right next to your primary PCI e6x slot we have another 4X slot
here and we have a PCI slot okay so if
you're installing two 16x cards they will run at full 16x 16x and you will be
left with an 8X a 4X and an 8X for
expansion okay if you're installing three PCI Express graphics cards you
will use this one this one and this one and you will be left with a single
PCIe 8X slot for expansion and these will run at 8X 8X 8X in all likelihood
although it might be 168 and 8 if you are running four graphics cards you'll
use this one this one this one and this one they will run at 8X 8X 8X 8X so you
will still get pretty much full performance out of all four graphics
cards and you better watch out because you're going to want to make sure your
case has additional room to hang over that uh Second slot on the bottom
graphics card such as if you have a Corsair 800d then you're in good shape
because even though it's a 7 PCI slot case it does have an overhang and it
does have a ventilation slot under that last expansion card okay the overall
layout of the board Bo looks very very nice let's show you guys where the fan
headers are so we've got our four pin CPU fan header here we've got a three
pin here we've got a four pin here we
have a three pin here and that's about
it actually not too many fan headers on this guy all right having a look at the
back we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 USB 2.0
ports uh this one is one of those combo USB 2 e SATA ports we have another
USB wow what is this thing no that must be ESAT Okay so we've got another eSATA
Port um PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port
Optical and coax seal digital audio out fire wire two USB 3.0 ports gigabit
Ethernet and 7.1 audio so this is pretty much the
cream of the cream for AMD boards you can install anything from a four-way
6970 graphics card configuration with 16
gigs of RAM and a high-end six core or even 8 core once they're released CPU
you can install a bunch of SATA 36 gbit per second ssds this will accept pretty
much anything you throw at it thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 990
fxa ud7 from Gigabyte and don't forget to subscribe to Linus techtips for
unboxings reviews and other computer videos sorry guys one thing I neglected
to mention is this is slightly wider than ATX it's not eatx which would be
about here but you can see that past these three uh mounting holes there is a
little bit of extra PCB on the edge here so you should make sure that your case
does support slightly wider than ATX specification