so today I'll be doing a quick unboxing of the Gigabyte 890 fxa ud5 and the
reason I'm actually unboxing this is I unboxed the 890 fxa ud7 very recently
and I was going to use it on my test bench but I didn't realize even at the
time I was unboxing it that it's actually one of those boards that's like
one slot longer than a normal ATX motherboard so it didn't even fit on my
test bench so now I need a different motherboard that supports USB 2 USB 3
eat and fire wire so yeah there there
there's one thing about this motherboard it has support for seemingly every
conceivable external drive interface possible so let's go over some quick
features here first of all it has their 333 onboard acceleration that means you
got usb3 USB power 3x and so USB power
3x is a way to deliver three times the power through the USB 2 as well as the
usb3 ports so it means you can power more devices off one port very cool
thank you Gigabyte we've also got Thea 3 which is 4 * the speed via raate
z Oh okay that's an interesting way to
measure that because it's actually two times the speed of SATA 2 but I guess if
you raid zeroed it it would be four times the speed okay and then we have a
three-year warranty in the US in Canada as well as their new onoff charge so you
can see they've got like an iPhone plugged into a USB port their USB ports
will actually charge certain devices even when the computer is powered off
pretty sweet we've also got support for Ultra durable 3 which is a 2 OST copper
PCB Japanese solid caps all that good stuff we have support for AMD's latest
Phenom 2x6 6 core processors as well as
support for auto unlocking so if you plug in a dual core or a triple core
then you will be able to just automatically unlock the extra cores as
long as they are stable we have support for three-way Crossfire X as well as
native support for SATA 3 6 gbit pers second via the S sp850 so that means
that unlike the Intel Boards out there AMD's latest chipsets actually support
SATA three natively you don't have to plug in any additional third party
chipsets to the motherboard okay so let's have a look at the accessories
that are included first we've got an IO shield and the cameraman is apparently
trying to move his wrist rest thing so that he can get closer and look at my IO
Shield there we go then we have a users
manual which has a driver DVD or utility
DVD rather download the latest off the Gigabyte website don't bother with that
in here we've got uh this is all English
and it covers bio settings installing your drivers a couple basic
troubleshooting things uh front panel headers where to plug stuff into the
motherboard then you've got like a physical installation guide book so how
to install a CPU um this is more like a quick start guide and it's in a bunch of
different languages including wow what is this okay leave a comment if you know
what language this is are you not even focused there you go
wow I yeah I've never heard of that okay next we've got four SATA port or SATA
ports four SATA cables and these are uh
two right angle and two straight cables and then one IDE cable and then a random
piece of paper it's doing something in
there that's for sure okay here we go this is that like a weird angle too I
haven't I've never seen a motherboard box like this before all right oh we've
got a Gigabyte powered sticker so this is powered by Gigabyte or rather your
computer will be when you put this mother in it all right let's get this
board open here stop
rambling so this board so far actually
looks an awful lot like the ud7 that I already had a look at I I can I can see
right away that there are quite a few things in common so let's start at the
uh let's start at the center of the board we've got an am3 socket with support for the latest Phenom 2s uh
including x4s X6 x3s x2s whatever it is
you want to put in there it will be supported as long as it is am3 so that
means that you do have support for dual Channel DDR3 memory memory controllers
in the CPU so am3 CPUs DDR3 board thumbs
up good stuff up at the top of the board we've got our 8 Pin CPU power connector
right where it belongs and that's uh under sort of the uh the mosfet cooling
which I guess we'll have a closer look at later as I mentioned before DDR3 dual
Channel these are colorcoded so you want to put your dual Channel matching dims
in the same color slots then we have onboard power and reset this this is the
perfect place for those in my opinion because I think having them down at the
bottom of the board doesn't make any sense cuz as soon as you load it up with
expansion cards you can't access anything down here anyway this is great
you got your 24 pin power right where it belongs as well as your floppy and IDE
connectors next you've got a clear seos button and while this isn't quite as
good as at the back I/O plate it is way better again than having it down at the
bottom of the board where you can hardly even access it when it's installed in a
case this is terrific okay on the side we've got two SATA 2 ports those are
running off a third party chipset which actually I I can't tell who makes it
because it's labeled Gigabyte SATA 2 okay and then we have six SATA 3 ports
so those are all running off of the ATI sb850 Southbridge then we've got uh
system fan I don't know what these are
tsl1 and tsr1 I'm guessing this is left
and right but um hm left and right of
what impossible to say at this time okay we've got another clear seos jumper
here that's kind of interesting so you can clear the seos the oldfashioned way
as well and then we've also got our front panel headers including three USB
one fire wire and one Comm then we have
an lpt wow really that's a parallel port
header I haven't seen that on a board in a while okay well good good on you
Gigabyte for including that for the people who still need it okay then we've
got two PCIe 1X slots four physical PCIe
16x slots and one PCI slot now looking
at the electrical connections in these slots these two are going to be 16x 16x
if you're running SLI or cross rather SLI if you're running Crossfire this
board does not support SLI only 3-way
Crossfire and then these two ports are going to run in 8X mode regardless of
what you're doing actually you know what this one's 4X only so if you're running
two Crossfire cards you're going to use this one and cover this slot and then
you're going use this one and cover this slot for the maximum electrical
connectivity speed and then if you run three cards you'd add another one here
covering the PCI slot and it would run 16x 16x 8X now since 8X actually doesn't
have an impact on performance with modern video cards what I would probably
do is I'd try and find a long Crossfire bridge and I'd run it in this one and
this one that way you got a nice big gap between your cards you leave open uh a
16x maybe electrical 8X at that point as well as a 4X slot and a 1x slot and then
you cover the ancient PCI slot that's probably what I would do so here we've
got our cooling solution so here's the little cooler on the S sp850 South
Bridge you can see that it's not going to do a whole lot cooling wise but it
looks cool and uh since it doesn't kick off a whole lot of heat anyway it
doesn't really matter Gigabyte has their kind of uh Aztec inspired looking
Northbridge cooler on here I really like this once again it doesn't have like
very it it doesn't have a lot of fins on it it's not going to do a whole lot of cooling but it totally doesn't matter
because the North Bridge again also doesn't kick off a lot of heat then
we've got our mosfet cooler this one does actually do some cooling it's
cooling the 8 plus two-phase power design that is going to be delivering
power to up to six cores worth of CPU processing power and this board unlike
the ud7 is actually a normal length so
the ud7 doesn't have a slot here it skips this slot and then it has seven
slots so the board is actually a little bit longer go figure okay then we're
moving on to the back where we will find ports so there are 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 USB
2.0 ports one PS2 uh keyboard mouse
combo Port then you've got digital audio out in both flavors uh Optical as well
as coaxial then you've got two firewire ports and these two are besides being
USB 2.0 ports they are also eSATA ports
so the USB 2.0 contacts are on the bottom and the eat contacts are up here
on the top very cool then we have USB 3.0 two gabit Ethernet as well as 7.1
audio out thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 890 fxa ud5