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.
Value -Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 can be found on the Internet for around $190. This makes it one of the least expensive boards in our test group. When you top that with an AMD Phenom II X6 1100T black edition at $195 you can get a pretty decent system for not a lot of money. On the opposite side, the performance is also not going to be as high as some other offerings out there. We have to be honest here. The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 might not be worth it as it performs today. We will revisit this board when Bulldozer hits and also with the next major BIOS and driver Update. The reason for this is because we are fairly certain that our performance numbers will increase as some of the issues are ironed out for this new product.Conclusion -The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5’s performance was all over the place. In some applications we saw what we hoped to see going in; an improvement in performance over the last generation. This was not the case in every application. We were more than a little shocked to find that the 890 and even the 770 Chipsets appeared to perform better in many of our tests. However, what we do strongly feel that much of this can be fixed with new drivers and also a few tweaks to the BIOS. We are also fairly certain that once we get our hands on a Bulldozer CPU we will see some of the performance potential of this product come to the surface. For now I would keep your eye on this board as we know that Gigabyte can put out a solid product, they just may need some time to tune this one in properly.Discuss this in our Forum
