As you saw with our recent coverage of the Gigabyte Open Overclocking Competition (GOOC) North American Finals Gigabyte is pushing their way back into the fore front of the enthusiast scene. It was not that long ago when their mindset seemed to be one of just maintaining the status quo and building boards for the average consumer. But something changed their minds and they decided to refocus on the enthusiast and the upper end of the consumer market (the upper-mid-range?) We began to see Gigabyte (or GB for short) drop things in like 2 ounces of copper into each board. They shifted away from standard capacitors and move to all solid caps. They beefed up their power phases and even added in a hardware/software phase switching capability for better energy efficiency. GB seems to be willing and able to push the envelope of the enthusiast’s needs and even some of their crazed wants with their newest additions to the Ultra Durable line up. They have shown us great promise with their Intel based boards, so how about something from AMD? Not that long ago we took a look at the 890FXA-UD7 with AMD’s flagship CPU the Phenom II X6 1090T just to see if Gigabyte can maintain the same performance levels with AMD as they have shown with Intel’s CPUs.
Features -In the current market motherboard (and indeed almost all component) 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.
Gigabyte is like many companies, they are going to list everything as a feature. However, as we mentioned above not all features are real. Some are great and some are like the floor mats in your car listed as a feature, but you know you are going to get them with every car you look at.
Excellent Auto UnlockSATA 3.0USB 3.0Dual GBe LANPrecision OVQuad Crossfire
These items are excellent reasons to pick up the 89FXA-UD7. They are things that differentiate the product from others in its class and also from other 890FX boards from GB.
In the middle (sort of good)ON/OFF ChargeSmart RecoveryXpress BIOS RescueDual BIOSSilent Pipe IIUSB/eSATA Combo EasyTune 6
Here we have a feature set that adds value but are usually not going to be deal breakers.
@BIOS
This list is, well it just is. Almost all of this you would expect on a high-end motherboard. If these things were missing (whatever they are called) you would probably not be picking that product up.
