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Review: Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 motherboard

by Tarinder Sandhu on 17 October 2011, 10:34 3.5

Tags: Gigabyte (TPE:2376)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa7oc

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Setup and notes

Comparison systems

Motherboard Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 ASUS Crosshair V Formula
Motherboard BIOS F6E 8301
Processor AMD FX-8150
Chipset driver AMD AHCI 1.2.1.301
Memory Corsair 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3
Memory timings 9-9-9-24-2T @ 1,600MHz
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Graphics driver Catalyst 11.9
Disk drive Corsair V128 SSD
Optical drive Sony AD-7263S
Chassis Corsair Obsidian Series 700D
Power supply Corsair HX1000W
Operating system Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

CPU and memory benchmarks

AIDA64 v1.80 The successor to Everest - useful for measuring memory bandwidth and latency
HEXUS.PiFast
Our number-crunching benchmark stresses a single core by calculating Pi to 10m places
wPrime 2.0.4 Another number-crunching benchmark that stresses all available CPU cores/threads
CINEBENCH 11.5 Using Cinebench's multi-CPU render, this cross-platform benchmark stresses all cores
7zip 9.20 We use the built-in benchmark in this open-source file-compression utility
TrueCrypt 7.0a An encryption/decryption benchmark that's partial to AES acceleration

GPU benchmarks

3DMark 11 Run at the default performance preset
StarCraft II DX9, 1,920x1,080 ultra quality - 2x AA
Call of Duty: Black Ops DX9, 1,280x720, low/medium quality

General benchmarks

Storage performance USB 3.0 read and write speed (Kingston SSD inside Tsunami enclosure)
Power consumption While idling and when running wPrime

Testing notes

We've put in our shiny FX-8150 chip and looked at the Gigabyte in relation to the ASUS 990FX Crosshair V Formula motherboard. While we already have stock-clocked numbers for the ASUS board, we feel as if there's little point in showing you just how fast the Gigabyte UD7 is at basic speeds. Rather, potential purchasers will look to use such a board as a base for really pushing the chip.

Accordingly, the Gigabyte has been benchmarked with the FX chip running at 4.7GHz/1.42V, in line with the also-overclocked ASUS, and we'll determine just which is the better board for the enthusiast. You'll see three sets of results in upcoming graphs: one for the stock-clocked ASUS and two for the overclocked Gigabyte and ASUS boards.