Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 Motherboard Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 Motherboard Review - Every once in awhile you come across a motherboard that raises the bar on what an enthusiast board should be. It sets the standard for features and performance exceeding all your expectations. This type of board forces every board you see from that point to meet a higher standard in order to impress you. The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 is not one of those boards.
 
I just installed a GA-990FXA-UD5 (very similar feature set) along with new memory and SSDs yesterday and didn't have any of the problems mentioned. I didn't try running RAID on the Marvell controller or using eSATA but I had absolutely no issues with my Crossfire cards, installing windows, memory issues or any stability problems. In fact this was probably one of the fastest, easiest mainboard swaps I've ever done. It took maybe 15 minutes start to finish to install Windows 7 from DVD (having RAID-0 Sandforce SSDs for OS volume probably helps), although admittedly I didn't time it.

I noticed for the UD5 there is now a F4 BIOS update that is supposed to resolve memory compatibility issues. I know mine doesn't have it since I received the board the same day that the firmware was released but maybe it would help with the Corsair RAM.

I haven't tried any overclocking yet but so far the UD5 has been rock solid. My previous board / memory combination (GA-MA790FX-DS5 + Kingston DDR2 800) was a little finicky and I had to play around with the north bridge voltage and clock to get it working nicely, but I haven't had any issues so far.

I will try pushing it [H]ard tonight with gaming and benchmarks and see if anything crops up.
 
I think you forgot to add this at the end:

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Just another half baked product - it just wasn't left in the oven long enough.

Let's see - these companies MUST know the product is completely lame. Oh that's right, they are figuring we will all will buy it and HOPE they fix the 2948232 issues it has.

Remember all of you future business owners - build something shitty, don't test it, set an unreasonable price for the piece of shit, send it out, and deal with problems later.
 
I feel these boards were rushed out when they should have waited a month or so to iron out the issues.
 
freakin' OUCH!

thanks for the review guys...keep it real
 
no, the correct answer in why the released the board is so they can piss off the 890FX-ud5 rev 2.x owners because they don't have an am3+ bios update and they r hoping we will "upgrade" to this...
 
Man even if BD is better than SB do I really want get a 900 series board....
 
It appears that a heatsink such as the Zalman CNPS9900Max might make contact with the first PCIe x16 slot's PCB when a card is installed in that slot.

Also no retention bracket included or am I missing something?
Not that I care but it just seems odd.
 
Kyle, forgive me if you and Dan have already tried this, but I couldn't see it in the review.

As dumb as this may sound, did you try different SATA-III cables with this board and the drives? The reason I'm mentioning it is that I've seen something similar to what you're experiencing on a desktop build I did a few months ago at my day job (a brand new, fresh out of the box HP DC7900 convertible minitower of all things).

I had set up a RAID-0 stripe with two WD 160GB HD's and I had experienced incredibly long install times for Windows, random BSOD's (when it did work), abysmal read times, etc. If I manually forced the SATA speed to 1.5GB in the BIOS it would work better, but it was slower than molasses going uphill in a New England blizzard.

It turns out the SATA cables were bad right out of the box. I replaced the cables with some iogear SATA-III rated cables and it not only resolved all the issues, but made the system run like a raped chicken. :D

If you haven't tried swapping the cables for known good ones, give it a shot. It won't resolve the other issues, but it may be the reason behind the poor drive performance.
 
Last edited:
Blacklash said:
A general note, If you fellows plan on testing the Crosshair V my advice is to flash to BIOS 0506 and install windows 7 from a usb flash drive by selecting UEFI <usb drive name here> from the boot menu during post.
Click to expand...

Funny you should say that, since I got a Crosshair V board recently with the 0404 BIOS and can't even get it to POST without hard-locking, let alone update the BIOS. :mad:

I'm getting the distinct feeling that these 990 boards are rather half-baked and rushed to market to meet to original Bulldozer release date. Now we're left with one big fucking mess of shitty motherboards.

I'm giving it one more shot with the Crosshair V tonight, and if it still acts up, it's getting returned.
 
Thanks for an HONEST review with no ass kissing. Very refreshing and educational.

Im really surprised. Gigabyte putting out a $250 motherboard that has this many issues. Thats really not like them. Im planning on getting an Asus Sabertooth 990FX when BD finally comes out and gets settled in but I was eyeballing this one too. Not any more.
 
I had very similar problems with a (relatively) old core 2 duo gigabyte motherboard and the windows 7 installation. Setup would just hang between the steps for 5-10 minutes then pop the next screen...pretty weird...

Mine also came with usb keyboard and mice disabled by default...which took me a while to figure out why they would not work between the bios and windows...

othen than that it's been pretty solid
 
CzarKasm said:
Funny you should say that, since I got a Crosshair V board recently with the 0404 BIOS and can't even get it to POST without hard-locking, let alone update the BIOS. :mad:

I'm getting the distinct feeling that these 990 boards are rather half-baked and rushed to market to meet to original Bulldozer release date. Now we're left with one big fucking mess of shitty motherboards.

I'm giving it one more shot with the Crosshair V tonight, and if it still acts up, it's getting returned.
Click to expand...

Mine has been rock solid with no probs at all, and I am running the 0404 bios. So please dont say that all 990 boards are shit, maybe you got a dud or your having issues with the hardware your using.
Plenty of help here in the AMD Mobo forums, Good luck with your build.
 
This is not like normal Gigabyte MBs. I'm so glad I'm a member here at Hocp! Telling it like it really is, no bullshit! I've been very happy with past Giga boards and was trying to decide between Sabertooth, Crosshair V, UD5 and UD7. If the Saber tooth had an Intel NIC like the CH V I would be all set. I guess I have some time to see how things shake out.

Will you guys get a reply from Gigabyte? If you do, will you let us know what they had to say?

Thanks again for the hard work!
 
I've been waiting for this review for a while now. I really wanted to pick this board up but glad I didn't. Seems like all these 990fx boards are having issues so not sure what to get now.
 
AthlonXP said:
I feel these boards were rushed out when they should have waited a month or so to iron out the issues.
Click to expand...

So far I've felt that way about every 990FX board I've seen so far.

hesho said:
no, the correct answer in why the released the board is so they can piss off the 890FX-ud5 rev 2.x owners because they don't have an am3+ bios update and they r hoping we will "upgrade" to this...
Click to expand...

The 890FX is a very mature platform. And the odd thing is, aside from VRD / VRM specification updates for Bulldozer / Zambezi, the 990FX is pretty much the same thing.

munkle said:
Man even if BD is better than SB do I really want get a 900 series board....
Click to expand...

At this point, I'd say HELL NO. So far I've just not seen a 990FX board I'd actually use in my own systems.

DisrupTer911 said:
It appears that a heatsink such as the Zalman CNPS9900Max might make contact with the first PCIe x16 slot's PCB when a card is installed in that slot.

Also no retention bracket included or am I missing something?
Not that I care but it just seems odd.
Click to expand...

The retention bracket is in the box. The reason it's not installed is due to the fact that Kyle and I both use waterblocks on our test benches. Usually I reinstall the bracket for taking photos but for whatever reason, I forgot to do that this time around.

Fifth Horseman said:
Kyle, forgive me if you and Dan have already tried this, but I couldn't see it in the review.

As dumb as this may sound, did you try different SATA-III cables with this board and the drives? The reason I'm mentioning it is that I've seen something similar to what you're experiencing on a desktop build I did a few months ago at my day job (a brand new, fresh out of the box HP DC7900 convertible minitower of all things).

I had set up a RAID-0 stripe with two WD 160GB HD's and I had experienced incredibly long install times for Windows, random BSOD's (when it did work), abysmal read times, etc. If I manually forced the SATA speed to 1.5GB in the BIOS it would work better, but it was slower than molasses going uphill in a New England blizzard.

It turns out the SATA cables were bad right out of the box. I replaced the cables with some iogear SATA-III rated cables and it not only resolved all the issues, but made the system run like a raped chicken. :D

If you haven't tried swapping the cables for known good ones, give it a shot. It won't resolve the other issues, but it may be the reason behind the poor drive performance.
Click to expand...

I've got tons of SATA cables and did try different ones. The results were the same. You do have to also realize, that the AMD SBx50 south bridges have never performed on par with their Intel counterparts. They are closer these days, but they lack the same stripe configuration options which limits their performance in some instances.

MacLeod said:
Thanks for an HONEST review with no ass kissing. Very refreshing and educational.

Im really surprised. Gigabyte putting out a $250 motherboard that has this many issues. Thats really not like them. Im planning on getting an Asus Sabertooth 990FX when BD finally comes out and gets settled in but I was eyeballing this one too. Not any more.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is the worst Gigabyte board I've ever reviewed. Normally I expect they'll have issues with their USB keyboard support but otherwise Gigabyte boards are generally problem free. This one was a nightmare to work with. I think it's the worst motherboard I've ever reviewed period. It's not the worst motherboard I've seen though, which is sad.

Vegas P11 said:
I've been waiting for this review for a while now. I really wanted to pick this board up but glad I didn't. Seems like all these 990fx boards are having issues so not sure what to get now.
Click to expand...

So far every 990FX board I've seen has been less than stellar. Again I don't get it because the last round of 890FX boards were all excellent.
 
I'm very glad that you guys were truthful as this is why people come to read reviews. Thanks for the review and I seriously hope that EVERYONE making a 990x based AM3+ motherboard gets their crap together before BD launches. It just makes no sense how every single one of them are spotty when this isn't some radical overhaul.
 
i think the 990fx boards are for bulldozer only. Would explain why they have so many quirks with the current generation of amd processors/hardware.

Would be nice to actually have a bulldozer cpu to throw in them to see if they still have these sorts of issues.

Most of the 990fx boards seem to suck. I don't know if it is due to a rush factor, or if they are just poorly designed from the get go.

Something is off, i hope what ever it is that it is fixed before bulldozers start shipping.

I have the ud7 sitting in my closet atm, just waiting on bulldozer so i throw in the cpu. Perhaps i jumped the gun a little, but that was when i thought bulldozer would be released back in june. Hopefully my experience with it isn't as bad as yours. I already own a gigabyte board and it has some of the issues you mentioned, granted its a Gigabyte Ma790gp-ds4h (AM2+) board. The issues I have just learned to overlook and are rather minor to me.
 
ebduncan said:
i think the 990fx boards are for bulldozer only. Would explain why they have so many quirks with the current generation of amd processors/hardware.

Would be nice to actually have a bulldozer cpu to throw in them to see if they still have these sorts of issues.

Most of the 990fx boards seem to suck. I don't know if it is due to a rush factor, or if they are just poorly designed from the get go.

Something is off, i hope what ever it is that it is fixed before bulldozers start shipping.

I have the ud7 sitting in my closet atm, just waiting on bulldozer so i throw in the cpu. Perhaps i jumped the gun a little, but that was when i thought bulldozer would be released back in june. Hopefully my experience with it isn't as bad as yours. I already own a gigabyte board and it has some of the issues you mentioned, granted its a Gigabyte Ma790gp-ds4h (AM2+) board. The issues I have just learned to overlook and are rather minor to me.
Click to expand...

You aren't the only one. I'd really like to see if a Bulldozer / Zambezi processor on some of these boards to see how they behave.
 
Dan_D said:
You aren't the only one. I'd really like to see if a Bulldozer / Zambezi processor on some of these boards to see how they behave.
Click to expand...

Yeah. At this point I am pretty happy that Asus has beta bios up on my 890fx board, as this is looking like a good old fashion cluster fuck.
 
TheWeazmeister said:
Yeah. At this point I am pretty happy that Asus has beta bios up on my 890fx board, as this is looking like a good old fashion cluster fuck.
Click to expand...

In contrast I wonder if Zambezi will be worth a crap on the 890FX boards.
 
I have had problems with corsair and AM2 board of gigabyte before.

Wanted to see how the platform performs with 1866 ram, sadly it will take a good month and a half before we get to see any testing done on that side.

I have a problem expecting that all these "issues" to be able to be fixed by bios update, or are we going to see new revisions of the same mainboards before Bulldozer hits retail?
 
Pieter3dnow said:
I have had problems with corsair and AM2 board of gigabyte before.

Wanted to see how the platform performs with 1866 ram, sadly it will take a good month and a half before we get to see any testing done on that side.

I have a problem expecting that all these "issues" to be able to be fixed by bios update, or are we going to see new revisions of the same mainboards before Bulldozer hits retail?
Click to expand...

I would think alot of these issues are a result of the flux surrounding Bulldozer and the sort of smples motherboard makers have been getting. The focus must have been at some point to have a working bulldozer+990fx bios in the run-up to the chipsets launch, then the supply of samples dried up and some of the needed microcode specs changed. The state of these boards is the result of quite some upheavel earlier in the year.
I don't really think the sample [H] has is beyond saving, but the bios needed to bring it up to scratch will be at least 2, maybe 3 revisions away.
 
Great review.

I really appreciate Subsystem Testing, listing the performance of all the interfaces including USB 2/3 and Firewire.

I appreciate it so much, I'd like to see a comparison chart between the reviewed board and previous boards, in the same style as your benchmark graphs. I've had a few forum debates about Intel versus AMD USB performance, but I've yet to find anyone who has compiled the benchmark data.
 
Typical Gigabyte hating crap. I should do a counter-review. This board just bailed me out of a bad Tyan server motherboard. Their 8x PCIe slots actually work as they have been designed to. Not just for video cards, but for peripherals as well like my LSI Raid 9261.

Oh as far the keyboard issue goes -

Beta BIOS released
6/23/2011

1.Beta BIOS
2.Modify USB Keyboard compatibility

Guess you didn't bother to check if your motherboard's BIOS was up to date when you bought it. How you can skip over this is beyond me. There is your keyboard fix.
The BIOS was released 3 weeks ago.
 
Dan_D said:
Yeah, this is the worst Gigabyte board I've ever reviewed. Normally I expect they'll have issues with their USB keyboard support but otherwise Gigabyte boards are generally problem free. This one was a nightmare to work with. I think it's the worst motherboard I've ever reviewed period. It's not the worst motherboard I've seen though, which is sad.
Click to expand...

You're the motherboard reviewer, but I've had the opposite experience. Many on intel chipsets too.

I've been buying gigabyte for a while and I've finally just switched. The quality's gone so far downhill.

We'll start with P35. Their P35 boards' USB support was so bad that it caused the entire system to be unstable and hardlock/restart if it didn't like your USB hub or one of the devices plugged in. This didn't happen to me so I didn't really care about it and just thought it was user error.

This USB problem continued with their P45 implementation and was made worse by memory problems that wouldn't read timings correctly to the point of consistent boot failure for my Patriot, OCZ, or Corsair ram. That was awesome. The USB problem continues for gigabyte because they don't care and it's not fixed by bios settings or updates. The USB problem hit me hard with this board. The SATA support was problematic and caused hardlocks with a number of common performance settings.

Then I bought a 785 board and that thing was pretty crappy. Fortunately, my parents will never stress it to the point where it consistently fails. The onboard NIC is junk, SATA just as bad as P45, and iffy suspend states.

My friend got an 1156 gigabyte board and that was the biggest headache to setup I've ever experienced, and the machine was unstable until he replaced the board.

Never again... I had a similar experience with a recent MSI board. It just seems too many corners are being cut to save costs. It's a shame that most motherboards now have 4 stars and under avg reviews on Newegg.
 
AMDWiZARD said:
Typical Gigabyte hating crap. I should do a counter-review. This board just bailed me out of a bad Tyan server motherboard. Their 8x PCIe slots actually work as they have been designed to. Not just for video cards, but for peripherals as well like my LSI Raid 9261.

Oh as far the keyboard issue goes -

Beta BIOS released
6/23/2011

1.Beta BIOS
2.Modify USB Keyboard compatibility

Guess you didn't bother to check if your motherboard's BIOS was up to date when you bought it. How you can skip over this is beyond me. There is your keyboard fix.
The BIOS was released 3 weeks ago.
Click to expand...

I don't hate Gigabyte. Not at all. In fact almost every Gigabyte board I've ever reviewed was given high marks. The only thing I've consistently had issues with is their terrible USB keyboard support. I've addressed that with them and I still stand by my statements that boards shouldn't ship with that kind of problem. That being said, it's not really a deal breaker. The work around is easy enough. And when I wrote the review, that BIOS didn't exist. Yeah, I hadn't touched that article in about three weeks. And if you read the article, the USB keyboard support was the least of my problems.

Tyan's quality has dropped significantly in the last 5 years or so. I'm not surprised you had a bad experience with them. But your Gigabyte board won't work well for SCSI cards and other peripheral cards, but it will rock for video cards. While I think the Gigabyte hardware is vastly superior to the Tyan, you are comparing apples and oranges. You may have traded one set of problems for another. That being said, your mileage may vary and for uses, with your configuration the Gigabyte board might work fine.
 
Definitely going to wait a couple months before I switch to 990FX.

I'm disheartened to see all these issues with GB boards as that's all I use now.
 
Was hesitant to click on the article because you guys are usually rough on the AMD (cpu) side of things but looking at all the problems you ran into I now understand your point of view. Read threw the review with my mouth open (shocked at all the issues with the technology), can just imagine Dan running over the mobo with his car. Hahahaha………..
Hay Kyle, once BD comes out and if this platform still has the same issues can Dan run them over with your SUV for making him relive the frustration?!.......................
 
marzzez said:
Was hesitant to click on the article because you guys are usually rough on the AMD (cpu) side of things but looking at all the problems you ran into I now understand your point of view. Read threw the review with my mouth open (shocked at all the issues with the technology), can just imagine Dan running over the mobo with his car. Hahahaha………..
Hay Kyle, once BD comes out and if this platform still has the same issues can Dan run them over with your SUV for making him relive the frustration?!.......................
Click to expand...

I've got plenty of Tannerite and a .50BMG rifle waiting for that stupid board should it cross my path again. :D Actually I'd love to retest it with Bulldozer / Zambezi and see if there are any differences in the experience. For all I know, the 990FXA-UD7 will be the shining star of the AM3+ world once it gets the CPU it was designed for.
 
Dan_D said:
I don't hate Gigabyte. Not at all. In fact almost every Gigabyte board I've ever reviewed was given high marks. The only thing I've consistently had issues with is their terrible USB keyboard support. I've addressed that with them and I still stand by my statements that boards shouldn't ship with that kind of problem. That being said, it's not really a deal breaker. The work around is easy enough. And when I wrote the review, that BIOS didn't exist. Yeah, I hadn't touched that article in about three weeks. And if you read the article, the USB keyboard support was the least of my problems.

Tyan's quality has dropped significantly in the last 5 years or so. I'm not surprised you had a bad experience with them. But your Gigabyte board won't work well for SCSI cards and other peripheral cards, but it will rock for video cards. While I think the Gigabyte hardware is vastly superior to the Tyan, you are comparing apples and oranges. You may have traded one set of problems for another. That being said, your mileage may vary and for uses, with your configuration the Gigabyte board might work fine.
Click to expand...

Even with the new bios, this still means the board SHIPPED in an unacceptable state. Gigabyte is to blame for launching something that was not ready, and the reviewer was correct in his initial findings.
 
DisrupTer911 said:
Definitely going to wait a couple months before I switch to 990FX.

I'm disheartened to see all these issues with GB boards as that's all I use now.
Click to expand...

Every company makes mistakes. Gigabyte hasn't made very many over the years aside from the one they keep making, which I always bitch about. To be fair, all the 990FX boards seem to be problematic. So the blame may not be Gigabyte's alone.
 
Good thing we aren't all the same, we'd all be robots :)

I guess perhaps I didn't clarify, and maybe I should. I had a tyan server motherboard fail a couple days ago which was running my organization's hyper-v. Its a dual opteron 6100 board. I had two raid controllers which were splitting RAID on the backplane. At 1 in the morning, the last thing I needed to do was scramble for another motherboard but that's what it came down to.

The Tyan motherboard carries a $500 pricetag so something had to fill the void until I got a replacement overnighted. I went through (3) different motherboards before I had to drive home out of desperation and try the Gigabyte board. All the other boards would freeze just a little beyond the initial post when I plugged the raid cards in.

Amazingly, the only board that accepted my server configuration was this Gigabyte AM3+ board. I had enough PCIe 8x to do the job where the others failed big time. The motherboard bought me enough time to get the information off my RAID and move my virtual machines to another server. This board literally saved my ass and 2 days of company downtime only for the simple fact is that it could actually fully boot my RAID cards. BIOS issue with the other motherboards... perhaps... no time to test because time was of the essence.

I wasn't trying to compare Tyan to Gigabyte - all i meant to say was this board stepped in and delivered some fully functional PCIe 8x slots that bailed me out. What I wanted to point out was that these werent video card only slots like some manufacturers say they won't support anything but video cards in certain PCIe slots.

I think there is plenty of good things about this board vs. its equivilent Asus counterpart.
First of all it ran my Quad Channel 16GB memory with no errors @ 1600mhz with only 1 change in configuration (1T to 2T).
Second, the onboard Realtek LAN NIC 8111 is pretty damn solid. Let's not mention the fact that Realtek updates their LAN / Sound drivers EVERY MONTH, instead of Intel for that dreaded NIC on the Crosshair IV/ V motherboards. And guess what, NO BSOD.

I think there's alot of good things to say about this board. And I think the ultimate fair assessment is AM3+ boards are still new and as the BIOS matures, so will the stability of every board.

Respectfully,
AMDWiZARD
 
All PCIe slots conform to the same basic industry standard specifications. It isn't the PCIe lanes or that they are video card only slots (though that's primarily all they actually test during QVL) that make a slot work or not with a given card, but rather option ROM space and resource allocation. Some boards integrate too much junk for an add-in board to work properly. Proper BIOS implementation is the key. When they do things in the BIOS to gain overclockability and speed to win benchmarks, they tend to screw up compatibility with things like RAID controllers. It's not necessarily intention but they over look it because so few of their buyers will be effected by such things.

All manufacturers are guilty of this to some degree.
 
Dan_D,

I'll agree with that statement. I'm sure Gigabyte/Asus/Etc. isn't testing their flagship bulldozer gaming board for RAID card compatability lol :)

And correct, all PCIe slots do conform to the same standard, and thus should be backwards compatible (plugging 8x card in a 16x slot) but as you stated, I guess we can point the finger at everyone for "tweaking" their BIOS.

My disappointment with the motherboard is for $250, at least give us a graphical BIOS. I'm sorry but Asus won hands down in that department. I've been looking at the same damn BIOS screen for over 12 years, its time to move on.
And just for the sake of my last comment I got the replacement Tyan motherboard today and all is well again. :) Now its time to RMA the other one.
 
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