Features -
In the current market motherboard (and indeed almost all components) performance is very close. The days of a large performance advantage between boards using the same chipset are long gone. That is unless someone makes a HUGE mistake (like runs traces completely wrong). Now, the thing that differentiates different products is the features. These are things like power management, extra slots, better audio CODECs etc. It is these items that R&D teams work so hard to drop into what are really identical pieces of hardware at their most basic level.

The 990FXA-UD5 does have some features besides three-way SLI. It is just that three-way SLI is huge on an AMD motherboard. Still we do not want to take away from the other parts of the board that make up a good feature set.

Excellent -
New cooling design
8+2 Phase power design
Driver MOSFETs and Solid Ferrite chokes
108db SNR Audio CODEC
Three-way SLI and Crossfire (on an AMD board!)

Like we said there are other features of this board beside the three-way SLI. We were happy to see an audio CODEC rated at 108db SNR.  We still need to see if there is any power behind this, but it is a good start. The components listed are excellent when you consider the power that your average Phenom II x6 pulls in.

In the middle (sort of good) -
Dual BIOS
Multiple 4-pin Fan headers
3TB Drive support
eSATA 3.0
XHD (auto RAID)

Even the mid-range features are solid. I could see anyone of these tipping the scales in favor of a purchase

Floor Mats -
On/Off Charge
Auto Green
2oz Copper used on the board
Gigabyte’s 333+
Core Unlocker

These are pretty much stock features now and nothing that would really sway you one way or the other. Still they are nice even if they are common.