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.
The Box and Goodies -The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 has a box that will catch your eye, but it won’t make it water like some of the packaging that I have seen on shelves (and in the lab too). It is a glossy black with a fade in image of the board’s socket and cooling. Below this you do get some marketing material but it is not as bad as it could be. The most important (or at least eye catching) item is the small SLI logo on the front. It has been a very long time since true SLI was allowed on AMD’s product but here it is again.
Flipping the box around we find a much busier box. Here the marketing people have gone a little crazy. You have a picture of the board complete with pointers to interesting items, information on the 2oz of copper in all Gigabyte motherboards and more. Again the really interesting item is the 3-way SLI logo that we find. Hmmm I wonder what a Phenom II X6 1100T would do with three 4xx series GPUs in it?
Opening the box yields… well not much really. You get a couple of manuals, a few SATA cables a Driver/Utilities DVD, I/O shield, and a couple of GPU bridges. One of these is the all-important three-way SLI bridge. I guess with this light of a haul, Gigabyte spent all of their money on components and licensing.
