• Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7

    Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7

    Roydon Cerejo, Jun 02, 2010 1740 hrs IST

    Very good performance but too expensive

    Good performance, on/off charging, good cooling, 4-way CrossFire ready, clean layout, extensive overclocking options in BIOS

    Expensive, CPU temperatures weren't being reported in windows, Silent Pipe 2 cooler can't be installed with certain GPUs

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Gigabyte was the first ones to send us a motherboard based on the 890FX chipset and today we'll take a look at their flagship model the 890FXA-UD7. Since this is their top of the line motherboard, you can expect every single technology that Gigabyte has in this board. The 890FX is an enthusiast's motherboard for AMD's new Leo platform. These boards support the latest Phenom II X6 CPUs right out of the box.

Gigabyte offers all this and lots more. Here's a list of special features offered by Gigabyte.

  • On/Off Charge (a specially designed header which lets you charge you iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad a lot quicker even when the PC is off)
  • Auto Unlock Support (This lets you unlock any disabled core on your X2 or X3 Phenom II cpu's)
  • 4-way CrossFireX support
  • DDR3 1866+ support (you can overclock your RAM up to these speeds)
  • Hybrid Silent-Pipe 2 (you can choose between water cooling or passive heat sink for the Northbridge)
  • Ultra Durable 3 (2oz copper design, solid state Japanese capacitors, Ferite Core choke)
  • Dual LAN ports
  • Debug LED's
  • eSATA/USB combo ports
  • Onboard power/reset/clear CMOS switches
  • Gigabytes Energy saver and Easy Tune program

As you can see there are plenty of tweaking and customization options on this feature-rich motherboard. We'll have a look at the most of them in detail a little later, but first lets check the packaging and the bundle that comes with it.

Bundle



The motherboard comes in a large fancy box that just screams 'High end'. There's plenty of information on the box about all the supported features the board offers on the front and there's more on the rear.



On opening the box you can find the following accessories bundled;

  • Driver disk
  • Operation manual
  • Quick installation guide
  • 1x IDE cable
  • 4x SATA 3Gb/s cables
  • 1x SATA bracket
  • I/O shield
  • 2x Two-way CrossFire brackets
  • 1x Hybrid Silent-Pipe module

The bundle is pretty solid with all the necessary cabling provided. However, there wasn't any SATA 6Gb/s cable provided, so if you buy a 6Gb/s hard drive you'll have to get the cable separately, which is a bit disappointing.


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Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7 review motherboard Gigabyte review 890FXA-UD7 UD7 4-way CrossFire Overclocking 890FX amd ati leo



Discussion Board
(1) Comments
Chandra
,Chennai, on Jun 02, 2010 09:36 PM
I think the cheapest DDR3, SATA 3, and USB 3 combo motherboard with the 8 series chipset is around 5.5K (ASROCK) in the Indian markets. With a good mid-range graphics card (5 series ATI) it should make for a good all-round gaming machine.
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