Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5 Phenom II X6 Crossfire Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,773 words · ~8 min read
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so today I'll be doing a quick unboxing of the Gigabyte 890 fxa ud5 and the
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reason I'm actually unboxing this is I unboxed the 890 fxa ud7 very recently
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and I was going to use it on my test bench but I didn't realize even at the
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time I was unboxing it that it's actually one of those boards that's like
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one slot longer than a normal ATX motherboard so it didn't even fit on my
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test bench so now I need a different motherboard that supports USB 2 USB 3
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eat and fire wire so yeah there there
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there's one thing about this motherboard it has support for seemingly every
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conceivable external drive interface possible so let's go over some quick
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features here first of all it has their 333 onboard acceleration that means you
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got usb3 USB power 3x and so USB power
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3x is a way to deliver three times the power through the USB 2 as well as the
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usb3 ports so it means you can power more devices off one port very cool
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thank you Gigabyte we've also got Thea 3 which is 4 * the speed via raate
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z Oh okay that's an interesting way to
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measure that because it's actually two times the speed of SATA 2 but I guess if
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you raid zeroed it it would be four times the speed okay and then we have a
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three-year warranty in the US in Canada as well as their new onoff charge so you
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can see they've got like an iPhone plugged into a USB port their USB ports
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will actually charge certain devices even when the computer is powered off
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pretty sweet we've also got support for Ultra durable 3 which is a 2 OST copper
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PCB Japanese solid caps all that good stuff we have support for AMD's latest
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Phenom 2x6 6 core processors as well as
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support for auto unlocking so if you plug in a dual core or a triple core
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then you will be able to just automatically unlock the extra cores as
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long as they are stable we have support for three-way Crossfire X as well as
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native support for SATA 3 6 gbit pers second via the S sp850 so that means
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that unlike the Intel Boards out there AMD's latest chipsets actually support
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SATA three natively you don't have to plug in any additional third party
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chipsets to the motherboard okay so let's have a look at the accessories
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that are included first we've got an IO shield and the cameraman is apparently
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trying to move his wrist rest thing so that he can get closer and look at my IO
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Shield there we go then we have a users
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manual which has a driver DVD or utility
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DVD rather download the latest off the Gigabyte website don't bother with that
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in here we've got uh this is all English
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and it covers bio settings installing your drivers a couple basic
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troubleshooting things uh front panel headers where to plug stuff into the
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motherboard then you've got like a physical installation guide book so how
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to install a CPU um this is more like a quick start guide and it's in a bunch of
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different languages including wow what is this okay leave a comment if you know
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what language this is are you not even focused there you go
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wow I yeah I've never heard of that okay next we've got four SATA port or SATA
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ports four SATA cables and these are uh
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two right angle and two straight cables and then one IDE cable and then a random
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piece of paper it's doing something in
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there that's for sure okay here we go this is that like a weird angle too I
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haven't I've never seen a motherboard box like this before all right oh we've
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got a Gigabyte powered sticker so this is powered by Gigabyte or rather your
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computer will be when you put this mother in it all right let's get this
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board open here stop
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rambling so this board so far actually
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looks an awful lot like the ud7 that I already had a look at I I can I can see
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right away that there are quite a few things in common so let's start at the
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uh let's start at the center of the board we've got an am3 socket with support for the latest Phenom 2s uh
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including x4s X6 x3s x2s whatever it is
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you want to put in there it will be supported as long as it is am3 so that
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means that you do have support for dual Channel DDR3 memory memory controllers
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in the CPU so am3 CPUs DDR3 board thumbs
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up good stuff up at the top of the board we've got our 8 Pin CPU power connector
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right where it belongs and that's uh under sort of the uh the mosfet cooling
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which I guess we'll have a closer look at later as I mentioned before DDR3 dual
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Channel these are colorcoded so you want to put your dual Channel matching dims
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in the same color slots then we have onboard power and reset this this is the
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perfect place for those in my opinion because I think having them down at the
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bottom of the board doesn't make any sense cuz as soon as you load it up with
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expansion cards you can't access anything down here anyway this is great
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you got your 24 pin power right where it belongs as well as your floppy and IDE
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connectors next you've got a clear seos button and while this isn't quite as
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good as at the back I/O plate it is way better again than having it down at the
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bottom of the board where you can hardly even access it when it's installed in a
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case this is terrific okay on the side we've got two SATA 2 ports those are
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running off a third party chipset which actually I I can't tell who makes it
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because it's labeled Gigabyte SATA 2 okay and then we have six SATA 3 ports
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so those are all running off of the ATI sb850 Southbridge then we've got uh
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system fan I don't know what these are
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tsl1 and tsr1 I'm guessing this is left
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and right but um hm left and right of
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what impossible to say at this time okay we've got another clear seos jumper
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here that's kind of interesting so you can clear the seos the oldfashioned way
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as well and then we've also got our front panel headers including three USB
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one fire wire and one Comm then we have
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an lpt wow really that's a parallel port
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header I haven't seen that on a board in a while okay well good good on you
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Gigabyte for including that for the people who still need it okay then we've
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got two PCIe 1X slots four physical PCIe
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16x slots and one PCI slot now looking
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at the electrical connections in these slots these two are going to be 16x 16x
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if you're running SLI or cross rather SLI if you're running Crossfire this
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board does not support SLI only 3-way
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Crossfire and then these two ports are going to run in 8X mode regardless of
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what you're doing actually you know what this one's 4X only so if you're running
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two Crossfire cards you're going to use this one and cover this slot and then
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you're going use this one and cover this slot for the maximum electrical
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connectivity speed and then if you run three cards you'd add another one here
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covering the PCI slot and it would run 16x 16x 8X now since 8X actually doesn't
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have an impact on performance with modern video cards what I would probably
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do is I'd try and find a long Crossfire bridge and I'd run it in this one and
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this one that way you got a nice big gap between your cards you leave open uh a
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16x maybe electrical 8X at that point as well as a 4X slot and a 1x slot and then
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you cover the ancient PCI slot that's probably what I would do so here we've
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got our cooling solution so here's the little cooler on the S sp850 South
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Bridge you can see that it's not going to do a whole lot cooling wise but it
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looks cool and uh since it doesn't kick off a whole lot of heat anyway it
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doesn't really matter Gigabyte has their kind of uh Aztec inspired looking
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Northbridge cooler on here I really like this once again it doesn't have like
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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
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because the North Bridge again also doesn't kick off a lot of heat then
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we've got our mosfet cooler this one does actually do some cooling it's
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cooling the 8 plus two-phase power design that is going to be delivering
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power to up to six cores worth of CPU processing power and this board unlike
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the ud7 is actually a normal length so
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the ud7 doesn't have a slot here it skips this slot and then it has seven
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slots so the board is actually a little bit longer go figure okay then we're
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moving on to the back where we will find ports so there are 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 USB
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2.0 ports one PS2 uh keyboard mouse
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combo Port then you've got digital audio out in both flavors uh Optical as well
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as coaxial then you've got two firewire ports and these two are besides being
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USB 2.0 ports they are also eSATA ports
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so the USB 2.0 contacts are on the bottom and the eat contacts are up here
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on the top very cool then we have USB 3.0 two gabit Ethernet as well as 7.1
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audio out thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 890 fxa ud5