Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7 Phenom II X6 Crossfire Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
2,136 words · ~10 min read
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so today we'll be unboxing gigabytes cream of the cream for 890 FX
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motherboard so this is their highest end AMD motherboard for the moment that
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means that it has support for AMD's Phenom 2 X6 X4 or really anything else
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that fits in an am3 socket should you so desire it as I said before it uses the
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890 FX chipset so that means you've got support for Crossfire X up to fourway so
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actually why don't we go through all of Gigabyte's uh interesting Technologies
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they've got outlined on the front this is a new thing onoff charge that means
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that there are certain USB ports on the board that will actually support
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charging attached USB devices in this case they've got an iPhone attached to
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it even when the computer is off and one of the reasons they're able to do that
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is due to their 333 tech technology which is USB power 3x so they've really
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updated the way that they deliver power to the USB ports they deliver three
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times the specified power capability I mean you're not going to be over juicing
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all of your components but it can provide up to three times the amount of
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power even while the system's off very cool you've also got support for USB 3
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as well as SATA 3 as part of their 333 thing you also have a three-year
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warranty they should call it like 3333 in Canada and Ultra durable 3 it should
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be like five threes how how many more three things can we do uh okay I don't
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see much else they've got auto unlock so that means that you can do core
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unlocking on this motherboard which I have covered a couple of times in the
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past how to do that four-way Crossfire uh SATA 3 6 gig oh right it has
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Southbridge 850 so that means you've got six SATA 3 ports so that is supported
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natively by AMD's chipset uh Gigabyte actually did not have to add a
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thirdparty chipset to this particular motherboard like they have to on the
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Intel boards so over here we've got some more outlines of the mostly the same
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features but here's a different one Sil hybrid silent Pipe 2 so this is a little
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like Tower heat well I shouldn't say little it's a huge Tower heat sink thing
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that you strap to the north bridge in order to get better cooling uh in my
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experience with the old x58 extreme it
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wasn't necessary but it did provide better cooling to the North Bridge as
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well as the mosfets because it's all connected by heat pipes uh on the back I
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don't see oh okay onboard quick switch so you've got onboard switches you've
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got an onboard debug LED uh dual landan
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ports and that pretty much covers everything that I see on the back here
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okay cool so let's get this opened up there we
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go just opening up the
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box I love gigabytes high-end boxes they
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just like they're a little bit busy you know but they cover everything so well
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it makes my life easier I don't think I ever said what the boards called it's
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the 890 fxa ud7 so ud7 puts it right up
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in the top tier of Gigabyte motherboards all right let's get this
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open so I'm going to take the board away from your interested Eyes First here and
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then we'll have a look at the accessories that are included first so
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okay I haven't seen Gigabyte do an accessory box like this before this is
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kind of unique so you pull it apart like this and then you can see what is inside
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so we have a users oh we have a sticker
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there's a powered by Gigabyte sticker okay then we have a users manual as well
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as a driver and utilities DVD so you
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should download the latest off the site don't use this DVD and then in here this
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is uh fully in English so it's covers
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everything from BIOS configuration to probably even installing drivers and uh
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some basic troubleshooting all that good stuff where to plug in all of your front
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headers I think I missed one here here is the multilingual installation guide
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book so this covers the physical installation and is in a variety of
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different languages and inside there I also found a Dolby Home Theater sticker
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very nice okay in the other side of this
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uh pack here I have more stuff so first I have a
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crossfire Bridge cross space fire okay
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that's very interesting and the top is unlabeled and then I have another
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Crossfire Bridge right okay I guess you could potentially need um a couple of
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bridges if you're going to be configuring quad Crossfire okay next we
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have some SATA cables oh These are nice
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actually gigabytes moving away well partially from their yellow SATA cables
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to something that actually matches the motherboard go figure beautiful I love
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it two straight and two right angle and then we've also got an IDE cable
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included next we have their eSATA bracket I really like these things it's
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a very convenient way to just add more ESAT cables or add more eSATA ports to
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your computer and then there's also a little power thing as well as an external power adapter so this is one
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Molex to two SATA power so with this bracket and this cable you can plug in
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two external hard drives very cool and they also include uh two e dat cables
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for you as well this is a far more complete kit than they used to include
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next we've got an IO Shield which handily labels all of the interesting
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stuff on the back so uh that's okay we'll cover that more later okay let's
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get this motherboard opened up
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here okay got a little plastic thing on
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top then we have the hybrid pipe too let
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me see if I can get this up yeah you can probably see it pretty good anyway so
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here's what you do you shake it so there's thermal compound included as
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well as four screws and so see these four holes right here those are going to
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strap onto the North Bridge right about where that water block is located right
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now so Gigabyte gives you the option and it comes with the water block installed
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by default of either and this is why it's called hybrid using this big tower
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heat pipe cooler thing which actually mounts to a PCI bracket at the back okay
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so then it mounts onto here and then goes all the way to the back of the uh
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the motherboard like this looks like that okay or you can leave the default
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water cooling Solution on which is an all copper Affair so you don't have to
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worry about it gunking up your uh your uh your water loop uh if you have to you
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know hook on any other blocks up to it and then I don't know where I was going
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with that it has included water cooling okay 38 inch barbs so it'll be
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compatible with most high-end water cooling systems as long as you're not using Overkill halfin barbs here's a
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little USB 3 sticker okay let's have a look at the layout of the board
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in the center we find in its ideal location the am3 socket surrounded by an
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am3 bracket this board uses 8 plus two phase power as I recall uh but I can
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double check that before I wrap up the video if I remember in the top left
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corner we've got our eight pin power in its ideal location we've got CPU fan uh
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this board does not use four pin fan connectors all over so that's a feature
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that's pretty cool but not included on this one we've got two dual Channel sets
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of DDR3 memory support so that's going to support up to 16 gigs of RAM with
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current 4 gig dims then we have onboard power and reset switches this is a
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breath of fresh air that is the right place for an onboard switch because when
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you've got four graphics cards installed which you know if you have a lot of
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money you would most of the onboard switches are down here you got a
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graphics card here how you going to access it no this is perfect because
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here you're plugging in the 24 pin connector there won't be anything else
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around there very nice then we've got an IDE cable floppy cable connector then
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down moving a little bit further we've got a clear Simo switch covered by a
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little protective plastic cover this is also a much better location for this
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than I've seen many times in the past while it's not quite as good as the back
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panel it's way better than having like you know some stupid little jumper
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hidden like here which I've seen many many many times okay next we've got our
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SATA ports so this is SATA 2 right here
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we've got two SATA 2 ports so you can use those for your Optical drives or
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anything where you don't care how fast they go and then you've got six SATA 3 6
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gbit per second ports very nice here's our onboard debug LED and uh yeah
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someone was knocking on the door but I think they figured out that I'm shooting a video right now here's our front panel
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connectors as well as our front USB uh one two 3 we've got three front
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headers for USB then we have one front header for fire wire and one for comb
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okay all right PCI Express configuration this is where it starts to get
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interesting you see all these little chips in here those are going to be
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splitting apart the PCI Express Lanes provided with this chipset so if you
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want to run two 16x cards at 16x speed
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you're going to be using this top port and then this one down here so if you're
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running dual Crossfire you're going to cover up these two and these two so that
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will leave you a PCI Express 8X port a
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PCI Express 4X Port as well as a PCI
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Express 8X Port okay so just just to be
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clear if you're running four you're going to cover this one again here so
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you'll be running in 16x 8X 16x and 8x
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and it's quite possible that it's going to split at 8888 but I'm not actually
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100% sure either way as long as you're running adex or above you are not going
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to run into any performance disadvantages so let's just have a quick
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look at the cooling Solution on the sth bridge I mean that's a pretty weak
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cooler but it looks really neat and since that sth bridge doesn't kick off a
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whole lot of it totally doesn't matter I like it then we've got our North Bridge
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cooling solution here which I've talked about enough I think and then our mosfet
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cooler so that cools the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
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plus two phase power design on this motherboard now let's have a quick look
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at our IO Shield at the back so USB 2.0 ports we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 now
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these are those USB 2.0 SL esatap Port
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so we've actually got two e SATA ports on the back and then they include that
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bracket you can have up to four SATA ports on this board very cool we have a
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PS2 mouse keyboard combo Port digital audio out in both Optical and coaxial
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flavors fire wire another fire wire 2 GB
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Ethernet USB 3.0 as well as 7.1 audio
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now I wish they' labeled which USB ports can be used for charging but I guess
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I'll go ahead and assume that at least some of them can and uh too bad for me
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thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 890 fxa ud7 from Gigabyte