Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 review (990FX chipset for Bulldozer)

[dividebyzero]

Quite a comprehensive unofficial review of Gigabyte's upcoming flagship motherboard- GA-880FXA-UD7- with AMD's 990FX chipset+ SB950 southbridge has surfaced...should you need any reminding that Bulldozer will soon be upon us.
Layout and colour scheme is in keeping with Gigabyte's recently released P67A/Z68 boards, and seems to offer a very comprehensive feature set including quad SLI, as well as the more usual quad CrossfireX, which would indicate that two NF200 chips reside under the heatsink between the MOSFET cooler and the first of seven PCIe x16 slots, or under the huge SB chipset cooler- since Nvidia don't as a rule offer quad card SLI unless all GPU's are afforded the bandwidth that a full 16 lanes provide.

Review is in Japanese so use your favourite translator

 

[red1776]

Nice find Chef,
Even though the extra bandwidth afforded by triple channel only shows up in the memory bandwidth synth, I am surprised AMD did not adopt triple channel controller for the BD.
I am also surprised by only 2 x USB 3.0 on the back I/O...again just for appearance sake ( you know how that works).

 

[dividebyzero]

...and 2 onboard USB3.0, so a 2+2 arrangement -same as the mainstream P67/Z68 offerings.
With the exception of the Crosshair V Formula (4+2), it looks as though the other manufacturers are happy with a single USB controller:
Asus 990FX Sabertooth
MSI 990FXA-GD80
ECS Black Series A990FXM-A
ASRock 990FX Extreme4

....still waiting on the EVGA 990FX Classified

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

That's actually Japanese.
That's also a lot of PCIE bandwidth.
I wish they had triple channel RAM; 3x2gb seems like a good compromise between 2x2 and 2x4.

 

[dividebyzero]

That's actually Japanese.

Thanks. Edited

 

[dividebyzero]

First actual (performance) review at Tom's.

There wouldn't seem to be much of a need to rush out and get the boards judging by the rumour that started circulating a couple of weeks back regarding Bulldozer's apparent delay.
From Toms:

The bad news is that those Bulldozer-based chips are still not ready. Processors based on the B0 stepping are in the hands of motherboard manufacturers. But they’re all telling me that performance is nowhere near what they were expecting, and it’ll take another stepping to fix them.

and from Anand:

AMD originally wanted to launch Bulldozer at Computex but performance issues with its B0 and B1 stepping chips pushed back the launch. Now we're looking at a late July launch with B2 silicon, but performance today is a big unknown. Apparently the performance of B1 stepping silicon doesn't look too good.

So no real reason to be an early adopter of the 990FX/X it would seem. At least prices should be lower when BD shows up.