Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 Crossfire Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,665 words · ~8 min read
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today I will be unboxing the 990 fx8 ud7
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this is a truly high-end 990 FX board
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from Gigabyte features a bucket load of features including unlocked performance
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that is to say it is compatible with the upcoming unlocked FX chips from AMD it
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features full support for AMD Crossfire X NVIDIA SLI
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oh man rocket give it a
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rest so I guess he just needed attention
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isn't that right rocket are you done bothering us
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now okay here you go there you go
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sweetheart off he goes all right so uh
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yes AMD Crossfire X NVIDIA SLI 333
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onboard acceleration that is USB 3 SATA 3 and three times USB power for
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additional power through us B hubs or charging higher powered devices Ultra
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durable 3 3year warranty and 8 plus2 phase
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power okay moving along to the inside we see a window through to the motherboard
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we see some glamour shots of the motherboard itself we see it features
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driver mosfets and what else we got over here so we've got support for four-way
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SLI and four-way Crossfire now there's a
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cool feature dual BIOS which means if you corrupt your BIOS during flashing
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you can restore it using another physical BIOS chip and hyfi technology
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giving you support for 3 tbte plus uh
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hard drives we have a debug LED for diagnosing boot problems as well as a
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couple of other things here including onoff charging for your USB devices with
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one of the front USB headers on the back
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we see pretty much the same stuff that we were looking at on the
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inside so let's go ahead and open this
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bad boy up
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all right now we see the window is huh that's kind of funny the window is small
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here but it's full size here someone who
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was designing the inner carton of the packaging was not talking to the guy who
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was designing the outer carton of the packaging who thinks I could be wrong
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though it's happened before all right let's have a look at what we've got in
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terms of accessories we have a Gigabyte 3-way SLI Bridge which is black very
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nice I hate seeing a black PCB gorgeous looking motherboard coming with a like a
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blue three-way s Bridge all right we have two right angle and two straight
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say to three cables we have a crossfire Bridge a four-way oh a
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black very nice black four-way SLI bridge and another Crossfire Bridge okay
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so we have oh yeah there it is there's a two-way SLI Bridge all of these are
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black all of them are very very nice looking that's uh very good to see I
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hate mismatched mismatched three-way and four-way SLI Bridges because you go and
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build a high-end system and then you put a eyes sore on it that doesn't happen
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very often colorcoded rear IO Shield we
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have a users manual with driver DVD throw that away download the latest from
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the Gigabyte website multilingual installation guide book a Gigabyte
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sticker and a Dolby Digital home theater
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sticker let's go ahead and close that up and have a look at the motherboard
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itself so the last ud7 board from Gigabyte was an XL ATX form factor and
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it looks like they have actually gotten away from that with this iteration which
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I think is probably a move for in the
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right direction so let's have a look at the you know what I'll do my usual thing
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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
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which supports all of your standard am2 am3 am3 plus CPU heat sinks as long as
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it supports the wattage being output by the CPU then you should be fine and this
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is interesting these are labeled coupon
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coupon 2 three and four those look like voltage readouts but
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uh fascinating so if anyone knows what the coupon those four coupon things are
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let me know I think maybe they mean CPU I got nothing okay guys uh the eight
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pin power connector in its top is in its ideal location in the top left of the
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board we've got our very nice heat pipe
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connected chipset and um mosfet cooling
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solution going on here so top chipsets here bottom chipsets here we used to
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call them North Bridge South Bridge now they're not and then the mosfets are
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here moving along to the right hand edge of the board we find our 24 pin
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connector in its ideal location we find power reset and clear seos buttons in a
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way better than usual location for onboard connectors down here is all fine
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and good until you install a PCI Express graphics card near the bottom of the
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board and then you can't reach it anymore so this is very smart Gigabyte
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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
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you can actually put four graphics cards in it and still access the features good
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on your Gigabyte all right we've got auxiliary
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power for our graphics cards here so you
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can plug in additional SATA connector love seeing this as a SATA connector
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rather than a PCIe or a Molex connector
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because you're bound to have more extra SATA connectors than PCIe connectors if
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you go and install four graphics cards am I right okay we've got gigabits G
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Gigabyte SATA 36 gbit per second ports here so those are running off a third
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party controller then we have SATA 3 6 GB per second ports here oh oh oh okay
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right so we've got eight total SATA 3 6 gbit per second ports these six are
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running off the AMD chipset these two are running off a Gigabyte third party
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chipset here is our debug LED here are
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our front panel connectors here is our front USB 3.0 front USB 2 that's the
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extra power one you can tell from the red background two front USB 2.0 front
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fire wire and front panel audio headers
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are available in terms of our PCIe layout we've got a very Advanced looking
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PCI layout here so here's a 16x slot here's another 16x slot so if
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you're installing two cards those are your guys right there those are the ones
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you want to use we've got a 4X slot this is pretty much not intended to be used
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because it's right next to your primary PCI e6x slot we have another 4X slot
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here and we have a PCI slot okay so if
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you're installing two 16x cards they will run at full 16x 16x and you will be
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left with an 8X a 4X and an 8X for
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expansion okay if you're installing three PCI Express graphics cards you
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will use this one this one and this one and you will be left with a single
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PCIe 8X slot for expansion and these will run at 8X 8X 8X in all likelihood
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although it might be 168 and 8 if you are running four graphics cards you'll
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use this one this one this one and this one they will run at 8X 8X 8X 8X so you
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will still get pretty much full performance out of all four graphics
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cards and you better watch out because you're going to want to make sure your
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case has additional room to hang over that uh Second slot on the bottom
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graphics card such as if you have a Corsair 800d then you're in good shape
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because even though it's a 7 PCI slot case it does have an overhang and it
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does have a ventilation slot under that last expansion card okay the overall
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layout of the board Bo looks very very nice let's show you guys where the fan
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headers are so we've got our four pin CPU fan header here we've got a three
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pin here we've got a four pin here we
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have a three pin here and that's about
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it actually not too many fan headers on this guy all right having a look at the
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back we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 USB 2.0
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ports uh this one is one of those combo USB 2 e SATA ports we have another
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USB wow what is this thing no that must be ESAT Okay so we've got another eSATA
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Port um PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port
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Optical and coax seal digital audio out fire wire two USB 3.0 ports gigabit
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Ethernet and 7.1 audio so this is pretty much the
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cream of the cream for AMD boards you can install anything from a four-way
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6970 graphics card configuration with 16
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gigs of RAM and a high-end six core or even 8 core once they're released CPU
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you can install a bunch of SATA 36 gbit per second ssds this will accept pretty
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much anything you throw at it thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 990
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fxa ud7 from Gigabyte and don't forget to subscribe to Linus techtips for
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unboxings reviews and other computer videos sorry guys one thing I neglected
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to mention is this is slightly wider than ATX it's not eatx which would be
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about here but you can see that past these three uh mounting holes there is a
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little bit of extra PCB on the edge here so you should make sure that your case
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does support slightly wider than ATX specification