Gigabyte Launches Its 990FX AMD Bulldozer Motherboards

Gigabyte seems to be the first company to make official its 990FX motherboard models for AMD's upcoming series of FX processors based on the Bulldozer architecture, as the company has just listed the 990FXA-UD7 and 990FXA-UD5 boards on its website.

AMD is expected to introduce the 900 AM3+ family of chipsets on June 1, so Gigabyte's decision to detail these two motherboards comes as a bit of a surprise.

The more powerful of the two models, the 990FXA-UD7, has been previously covered on our website, so we are going to move our attention to Gigabyte's other solution, the 990FXA-UD5.

Just as its name implies, this is also based on the 990FX chipset and the board looks remarkably similar with its older brother, the UD7.

However, the 990FX chipset has been moved to its usual place in the middle of the board, which means that Gigabyte was forced to swap one of the PCI Express x16 slots with a PCI-E x1, but users still get no less than five PCI-E x16 slots and a legacy PCI slot.

Thanks to this configuration, Gigabyte's board is compatible with 3-way SLI and CrossFireX setups.

Right below the SB950 south bridge controller, Gigabyte has placed eight SATA 6Gbps ports, two driven by a Marvell 88SE9172 IC.

CPU power is provided by a 8+2 phase PWM, which is cooled by an aluminum heatsink connected via a heatpipe to the 990FX chipset.

Moving to the back of the 990FXA-UD5, we get to see that Gigabyte has installed no less than eight USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 port, a pair of eSATA 6Gbps ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a FireWire port, a Gigabit Ethernet port and 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out.

Pricing hasn't been disclosed yet, but the two boards are expected to debut at the beginning of next month.