We have taken our walk around of the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 and found we like the design and many of the features packed into the system. In the second half of our test we will be diving into what you can get out of it when you put in under the stress of rendering, gaming and general purpose computing. We do have concerns with this new product as it has really been built with a newer CPU in mind (one that is not ready as of this writing). Still one of the things that AMD has always worked on is backwards compatibility. With that in mind we are breaking out our Phenom II 1100T and getting ready for some testing.
Section 1 Subsystems -Memory -Memory performance is very important on a motherboard, especially when you have a CPU with multiple cores and threads. If you have slow memory your cores and threads can become starved for data to execute. To test memory performance we run both Sisoft’s SANDRA and AIDA64. These two combine to not only give us accurate numbers but to validate each other. For testing at stock speeds the memory is hard set to 1333MHz while overclocking testing is done at the highest stable speed for the voltage of 1.65v this is due to the different memory dividers for each CPU. As such, the memory speeds will vary greatly. This means that the overclocked numbers are a little misleading and while they can show a trend are really only included to show if a board has a problem with memory performance at high clockspeeds.The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 performs a little slower than some of the 890FX boards we have tested (and one 780FX). We were a tad surprised at this and can only suspect that it could be due to the tuning present in the BIOS for the AM3+ CPUs that are being released in a couple of months. ADIA64 shows us part of the reason for the slow memory performance. What we find is both the read and write speeds are slowed down. This is from the high latency times that we find on the AMD internal memory controller. We do hope that AMD has managed to fix this with the new Bulldozer CPUs they are going to drop on the world in September.
Drive performance -Drive performance is also one of the major subsystems that goes to make up the performance of a motherboard. For our testing we use Sandra and AIDA64 again. We only test with single drives for each type of controller present on the motherboard (unless it is a professional product where we will use RIAD 5 and/or 10). We have also begun using a Seagate PS-110 USB 3 external HDD for our USB 3.0 performance. As a side note, we include the overclocked numbers here to make sure (again) that you are not going to see a major drop in performance due to minor instabilities at high clock speeds.For drive performance the 990FX-UD5 falls right in the middle of our test group. At least it does for the SATA 2.0 testing. When it comes to USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 we find that it is right at the same mark as the other boards we have tested.AIDA64 again adds detail to the raw scores we get from SANDRA. What we find is that the controller on the 990FXA-UD5 slows down when reading data from the middle and end of the drive.
Power -Power efficiency is another of those misnomers that we get caught up in. We hear about idle states and power gates. But what does that mean to you and I? On the surface having power management that reduces idle power sounds great and can be a benefit to someone that leaves their system on for long periods of time (and inactive) but how a system handles power under load and the delta between the two states is often more important than the idle power usage numbers. We use only P3 Kill A Watt instruments for measuring power. One of the things that AMD has always made a claim of is that they are more energy efficient than the competition. This was the case for many of their CPUs for a long time. They were able to pull less power and get more from them at the same time. However, we have seen recently that AMD is having to push quite a bit of power into their chipsets and CPUs to get the levels of performance that they do. Here we see the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 at the bottom of the list pulling more power at both idle and load than the others in our test group. It is this that probably stopped our 1100T from getting a higher clock than it did.Cooling (Board Level) -Board level cooling is an important factor in product performance and longevity. Components like the chipset, VRM modules and even capacitors need to be kept relatively cool to prevent failure. As these parts are made of silicon, they have a thermal breakdown threshold; or melting point. At that temperature the actual transistors built into chip will begin to deform and break down. Granted, the threshold is often very high, but you still need to make sure that components stay away from this level of heat for longer product life. The cooling on the 990FXA-UD5 seems to have a difficult time dissipating the heat that is generated by the power system. Although we do see decent temperatures at idle, but when we run the board flat out we see the cooling get a little saturated. Now it is important to remember that we are running this on an open test bench without the same forced airflow you would have in a case. However, even with this fact we are still seeing temps that are much higher than we would like.Audio -Audio is highly subjective. What we find pleasing may sound “off” to you. That is always going to the problem with testing audio; results will vary too widely depending on the tastes of the listener. However, there are ways of measuring the audio output with an objective ear. There is also the issue of audio causing performance issues in gaming and video playback. The reason this is a potential source of concern is that all onboard audio CODECs (Compression/Decompression) are CPU controlled. This means that while the audio chip controls the audio levels and effects of the audio the actual work is done on the CPU. Usually this will not be a problem with today’s powerful CPUs. Even the lower and consumer level products can handle high-end audio these days. But again there is the chance that a bad design or software will hinder your system and performance. On the other side the limits of board space, cost, etc will also prevent the level of audio quality you can get from an add-in board. We test all audio parts with three media types, Movie (DVD), MP3 Music, and Gaming. These are pushed to our Tec On model 55 Tube Amp to see if we can detect any signal issues in the reproduction. The audio on the 990FXA-UD5 is very nice (and I am an audio snob truth be told). It is more than sufficient to handle the audio from games, movies (even Blu-ray). This is not unexpected as the audio CODEC has a signal to noise ration of 108db. This means that for every decibel of noise (electronic or other) you get 108 of your audio stream. For an onboard CODEC that is pretty good.Networking -This one is something that is a requirement anymore. If you have a computer, the chances are good (like 99%) that you are also connected to high-speed internet. With this you need a good and solid LAN chip to make sure that your data flows properly out and back. The networking on the 990FXA is about what you would expect of a Gigabit Ethernet chip. It will get your data back and forth to the internet and around any home network you have. It is not going to win you any speed records, but it will get the job done.
