Gigabyte 990XA-UD3 990X Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
959 words · ~4 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of the 990 XA ud3
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this is a 2011 performance motherboard which is a very strange way to Brand it
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given that uh the bulldozer CPUs are fully supported by this particular board
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so it'll perform just fine in 2012 as
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well so yeah okay moving on unlocked
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performance means we have full support for am3 plus unlocked X processors from
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AMD this is a 9 series chipset so that means we do have support for Crossfire
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woo all 50,000 hour Japanese solid caps with 3x USB power USB 3 and SATA 3 that
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is the 333 onboard acceleration we also have support for 3 TB plus hard drives
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with the Dual BIOS hybrid EFI technology dual BIOS also means that if your BIOS
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is corrupted during a flash you can reflash it using the other physical BIOS
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chip located on the board we have 8 plus2 phase power ultra durable three
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classic and a 3-year warranty in the US and Canada so that's more like 3
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3333 3 all right on the back we see not
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a whole lot that we didn't already find out on the front so let's go ahead and
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open her up it does support the onoff charge feature which allows you to
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charge your iPhone even if the board is powered down very cool all right we have
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a utility DVD as well as a manual next we have an SLI Bridge black
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flexible Bridge my personal favorite all right we have a right angle and straight
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SATA cable times two so two right angle and two straight SATA 3 6 GB per second
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cables we have a colorcoded IO Shield very handy and finally we have a
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multilingual installation guide book oh
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no not finally wait there's more we have
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a Gigabyte powered sticker as well as a Dolby Home Theater sticker I'm not going
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to even try and get that out of there there all right let's have a look at the
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motherboard in itself so this uses a pretty typical Gigabyte AMD platform
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motherboard color scheme so we have a blue
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PCB with white and powder blue
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whoops there we go slots there we are so
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we have a black CPU socket that means support for
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am3 plus we've also got the standard mounting brackets so no matter whether
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you have an am2 am3 or am3 plus CPU heat sink it will fit very good stuff there's
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our 8 plus2 phase power design and our vrm heat sink our 8 Pin power connector
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is located in its ideal location along the top left corner and we have support
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for four dims in dual Channel off to the right here they are colorcoded for easy
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dual Channel operation our 24 pin connector is along the right hand edge
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of the board in its ideal location and we have six SATA 36 gbit per second SATA
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slot ports running off of the AMD chipset very handy love to to see that
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feature 6 SATA 3 remember there is no Intel chipset currently that supports
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more than two SATA 3 6 GB per second ports off the chipset itself we have our
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front panel connectors front panel USB
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we have um an extra power USB port
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remember that is ideal for connecting and charging your iPad using the utility
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we have two more front USB connectors trusted platform module we've got fire
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wire and front audio connectors also here another thing to note is that we do
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have full support for NVIDIA SLI as well as ATI Crossfire X in spite of the fact
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that this is merely a 990x board rather
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than being a 990 FX board it has a great PCI slot layout so let's go ahead and
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have a look so we've got two PCI e1x two
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PCI one PCI e4x this is physical 16x but
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is only wired up to 4X here and then we have a 16x and an 8X slot here so these
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guys are going to run in 8X 8X mode for SLI but please note that actually
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doesn't matter even on very high-end graphics cards you're not going to see a
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significant performance degradation from running them in 8X 8X mode if you
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install two dual Slot Cards you're going to be left with one PCI one PCI E1 and
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one PCIe 4X slot for expansion that's a great layout gives you all kinds of
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options you can go you know Revo Drive sound card and Legacy card no problem
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all right moving on to the back of the board we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 USB 2.0
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ports those are all high powered 3x power ports meaning you can plug them
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into a hub and run several high powered devices off of them we have PS2 keyboard
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mouse combo Port we have optical audio out fire wire two USB 3.0 ports gigabit
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Ethernet and 7.1 audio out so I'd say
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this board is great for a value type configuration throw 8 to 16 gigs of RAM
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in there throw an SSD and a hard drive on there it does have support for dual
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graphics cards but because it is 16x or 8X 8x um some people might not be
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comfortable installing two high-end cards so two value cards or one high-end
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card is a great choice for this and I'm very excited about the upcoming
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bulldozer CPUs which are fully supported by this board don't forget to subscribe
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