AMD is a company that not too long ago was on top. They had done something that no one thought possible; they were able to outperform Intel clock for clock. But they had a problem; they had a winning CPU but had to rely on others for a solid platform to run on. This prompted AMD to buy ATi (one of the companies that had a good chipset for AMD) which gave them a GPU business and a chipset business. The problem has been paying the bill on that particular purchase. This has prevented them from putting a lot of money into R&D and has also led to some, well unimpressive products (on the CPU side not the GPU). We have worked through several CPUs and chipsets; each one improving a little over the other but never really catching up to what Intel has on the market. Now things could be different; nVidia has allowed SLI on an AMD chipset and AMD is making good strides in terms of what their chipsets can do (with limitations from the CPU and IMC). We have their latest chipset in the form of the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5. This is a Three-Way SLI AMD motherboard with lots to offer. We are going to look at the design, layout, and cover some design philosophy and features along the way.
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 design8+2 Phase power designDriver MOSFETs and Solid Ferrite chokes108db SNR Audio CODECThree-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 BIOSMultiple 4-pin Fan headers3TB Drive supporteSATA 3.0XHD (auto RAID)Even the mid-range features are solid. I could see anyone of these tipping the scales in favor of a purchaseFloor Mats -On/Off ChargeAuto Green2oz Copper used on the boardGigabyte’s 333+Core UnlockerThese 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.
