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GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5

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AM3 AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

Motherboards > AMD Motherboards > GIGABYTE > GA-890FXA-UD5 (rev. 2.1)

GIGABYTE > Item#: N82E16813128441 - N82E16813128441

GA-890FXA-UD5/UD7 Owners Thread/Club. We look forward to hearing about your experiences with these great boards. We will try to keep this first post current with the latest relative update information and news. Our community also has a wealth of knowledge and will be glad to answer any questions you might have. Thanks!

Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5 Owners Club

The new 890FX chipset completes the lineup of 8 series chipsets from AMD to natively support the new 6 core CPUs from AMD to go along with the 890GX, the 880G and the 870 chipsets forming a top to bottom lineup to support AMD’s CPUs. With the exit out of the motherboard chipset market of NVIDIA, this leaves AMD as the only real solution for their CPUs.

GIGABYTE is one of the Tier-1 motherboard makers out of Taiwan. They make a variety of boards on virtually every motherboard chipset released on the market. Naturally with the release of the 890FX chipset earlier this month, GIGABYTE has released a new motherboard based upon it. Today’s review is on the new 890FXA-UD5 motherboard from GIGABYTE sporting the 890FX chipset.

The On/Off Charge is provided via a set of red and white USB headers on the motherboard. You can either use it as a regular USB connection or as a quick charge port for your mobile devices.

The AM3 CPUs add support for dual channel DDR3 memory to the CPU with DDR3 1333MHz supported. GIGABYTE says that their board can support DDR3 1866+ MHz speeds, but this requires overclocking. Six core CPUs like the 1090T and 1055T are supported out of the box.

The 890FX chipset supports up to eleven PCI Express devices with 44 PCI Express lanes by itself. The main reason for so many PCI Express lanes is support for multiple graphics cards which comes in the form of AMD's CrossfireX support. The 890FXA-UD5 supports 3-way CrossfireX with three dual-slot video cards such as the RADEON HD 5870. The board splits the four PCI Express x16 slots into x16/x16/x8/x4 offering a total of 44 PCI Express lanes when four single-slot cards are installed.

The 890FXA-UD5 supports 3-way CrossfireX with three dual-slot video cards such as the RADEON HD 5870. The board splits the four PCI Express x16 slots into x16/x16/x8/x4 offering a total of 44 PCI Express lanes when four single-slot cards are installed.

The 333 stands for three key new features:

• SATA 3 (6.0 Gb/second)

• USB 3.0

• USB 3x power.

SATA 6Gb/second support on the 890FXA-UD5 motherboard is native to the SB850 Southbridge meaning that PCI Express lanes do not need to be taken up to support it.

GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5 Motherboard Layout

All current AMD Phenom II CPUs including the 6-core 1090T and 1055T will work with this motherboard out of the box.

As the 890FX chipset has 42 PCI Express lanes available to it, the PCI Express slots are divided into two x16 slots, an x4 slot and an x8 slot.

Note that the motherboard supports 3-way CrossfireX with three dual-slot video cards like the HD 5870 cards.

You can install four cards on this motherboard but they would have to be all single slot cards.

The onboard audio is provided by a Realtek ALC889 CODEC, which has support for Dolby Home Theater, 7.1+2 channel simultaneous audio and is a standard audio chip with many design wins.

Note, that I have issues with the SB 850 chipset when it comes to setting up RAID 0 and will run all tests in AHCI mode. This is also where the LAN, ESATA, Onboard Audio, Firewire and USB controls are in the BIOS.

The GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5 motherboard is an interesting board in several respects. CPU Unlock allows the locked CPU cores of an x3 CPU to be unlocked (Note, not all locked CPUs can unlock). The ability to charge my iPhone whether the computer is on or off or on standby mode is a great feature. The ability to use USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gb/second devices are also great features. The performance of the board is higher than that of the 890GX chipset and the 890FX chipset seems to be the higher end of the two.

GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5 Motherboard Review - Introduction