welcome to my unboxing of the 990 XA ud3
this is a 2011 performance motherboard which is a very strange way to Brand it
given that uh the bulldozer CPUs are fully supported by this particular board
so it'll perform just fine in 2012 as
well so yeah okay moving on unlocked
performance means we have full support for am3 plus unlocked X processors from
AMD this is a 9 series chipset so that means we do have support for Crossfire
woo all 50,000 hour Japanese solid caps with 3x USB power USB 3 and SATA 3 that
is the 333 onboard acceleration we also have support for 3 TB plus hard drives
with the Dual BIOS hybrid EFI technology dual BIOS also means that if your BIOS
is corrupted during a flash you can reflash it using the other physical BIOS
chip located on the board we have 8 plus2 phase power ultra durable three
classic and a 3-year warranty in the US and Canada so that's more like 3
3333 3 all right on the back we see not
a whole lot that we didn't already find out on the front so let's go ahead and
open her up it does support the onoff charge feature which allows you to
charge your iPhone even if the board is powered down very cool all right we have
a utility DVD as well as a manual next we have an SLI Bridge black
flexible Bridge my personal favorite all right we have a right angle and straight
SATA cable times two so two right angle and two straight SATA 3 6 GB per second
cables we have a colorcoded IO Shield very handy and finally we have a
multilingual installation guide book oh
no not finally wait there's more we have
a Gigabyte powered sticker as well as a Dolby Home Theater sticker I'm not going
to even try and get that out of there there all right let's have a look at the
motherboard in itself so this uses a pretty typical Gigabyte AMD platform
motherboard color scheme so we have a blue
PCB with white and powder blue
whoops there we go slots there we are so
we have a black CPU socket that means support for
am3 plus we've also got the standard mounting brackets so no matter whether
you have an am2 am3 or am3 plus CPU heat sink it will fit very good stuff there's
our 8 plus2 phase power design and our vrm heat sink our 8 Pin power connector
is located in its ideal location along the top left corner and we have support
for four dims in dual Channel off to the right here they are colorcoded for easy
dual Channel operation our 24 pin connector is along the right hand edge
of the board in its ideal location and we have six SATA 36 gbit per second SATA
slot ports running off of the AMD chipset very handy love to to see that
feature 6 SATA 3 remember there is no Intel chipset currently that supports
more than two SATA 3 6 GB per second ports off the chipset itself we have our
front panel connectors front panel USB
we have um an extra power USB port
remember that is ideal for connecting and charging your iPad using the utility
we have two more front USB connectors trusted platform module we've got fire
wire and front audio connectors also here another thing to note is that we do
have full support for NVIDIA SLI as well as ATI Crossfire X in spite of the fact
that this is merely a 990x board rather
than being a 990 FX board it has a great PCI slot layout so let's go ahead and
have a look so we've got two PCI e1x two
PCI one PCI e4x this is physical 16x but
is only wired up to 4X here and then we have a 16x and an 8X slot here so these
guys are going to run in 8X 8X mode for SLI but please note that actually
doesn't matter even on very high-end graphics cards you're not going to see a
significant performance degradation from running them in 8X 8X mode if you
install two dual Slot Cards you're going to be left with one PCI one PCI E1 and
one PCIe 4X slot for expansion that's a great layout gives you all kinds of
options you can go you know Revo Drive sound card and Legacy card no problem
all right moving on to the back of the board we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 USB 2.0
ports those are all high powered 3x power ports meaning you can plug them
into a hub and run several high powered devices off of them we have PS2 keyboard
mouse combo Port we have optical audio out fire wire two USB 3.0 ports gigabit
Ethernet and 7.1 audio out so I'd say
this board is great for a value type configuration throw 8 to 16 gigs of RAM
in there throw an SSD and a hard drive on there it does have support for dual
graphics cards but because it is 16x or 8X 8x um some people might not be
comfortable installing two high-end cards so two value cards or one high-end
card is a great choice for this and I'm very excited about the upcoming
bulldozer CPUs which are fully supported by this board don't forget to subscribe
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