Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of the 990 x8 ud3 this is a 2011 performance motherboard see very strange way to brand it given that the bulldozer CPUs are fully supported by this particular board so it'll perform just fine in 2012 as well so yeah ok moving on unlock performance we means we have full support for aim 3 + unlocked FX processors from AMD this is a 9 series chipset so that means we do have support for crossfire all 50000 our Japanese solid caps with 3x USB power USB 3 and SATA 3 that is the 3 3 3 onboard acceleration we also have support for 3 terabyte plus hard drives with the dual BIOS hybrid EFI technology do BIOS also means that if your BIOS is corrupted during a flash you can reflash it using the other physical BIOS chip located on the board we have 8 + 2 phase power ultra-durable 3 classic and the 3-year warranty in the US and Canada so that's more like 3 3 3 3 3 3 alright on the back we see not a whole lot that we didn't already find out on the front so let's go ahead and open her up it does support the on/off charge feature which allows you to charge your iPhone even if the board is powered down very cool alright we have a utility DVD as well as a manual next we have an SLI bridge black flexible bridge my personal favorite alright we have a right angle and straight SATA cable times 2 so 2 right angle and two straight save a 3 6 gigabit per second cables we have a color-coded IO shield very handy and finally we have a multilingual installation guidebook oh no not finally wait there's more we have a gigabyte powered sticker as well as a Dolby home theater sticker I'm not going to even try and get that over there there alright let's have a look at the motherboard itself so this is a pretty typical gigabyte AMD platforms motherboards color scheme so we have a blue PCB with white and how does the looks there we go slots there we are so we have a black CPU socket that means support for am3+ we've also got these standard mounting brackets so no matter whether you have an a.m. 2 a.m. 3 or a 3 plus CPU heatsink it will fit very good stuff there's our 8 + 2 phase power design and our vrm heatsink our 8 pin power connector is located in its ideal location on the top left corner and we have support for Fordham's in dual channel off to the right here they are color-coded for easy dual channel operation our 24-pin connector is along the right-hand edge of the board in its ideal location and we have 6 say the 3 6 gigabit per second SATA slot the ports running off of the AMD chipset very handy love to see that feature 6 SATA 3 remember there is no Intel chipset currently that supports more than 2 say 2 3 6 gigabit per second parts off the chipset itself we have our front panel connectors front panel USB we have an extra power USB port remember that is ideal for connecting and charging your iPad using the utility we have two more front USB connectors trusted platform module we've got firewire and front audio connectors also here another thing to note is that we do have full support for nvidia sli as well as ATI crossfire X in spite of the fact that this is merely a 990 X board rather than being a 990 FX bar it has a great PCI slot layout so let's go ahead and have a look so we've got two PCIe 1x 2 PCI 1 PCIe 4x this is physical 16x but is only wired up to 4x here and then we have a 16 X and an 8x slot here so these guys are going to run in 8 X 8 X mode for SLI but please note that actually doesn't matter even on very high end graphics cards you're not going to see a significant performance degradation from running them in 8 X 8 X mode if you installed two dual slot parts you're going to be left with one PCI one PCIe one and one PCIe 4x slot for expansion that's a great layout gives you all kinds of options you can go you know Revo drive sound card and legacy card no problem alright moving on to the back of the board we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7:8 USB 2.0 ports those are all high powered 3x power ports meaning you can plug them into a hub and run several high powered devices off of them we have ps2 keyboard and mouse combo port we have optical audio out firewire 2 USB 3.0 ports Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio out so I'd say this board is great for a value type configuration throw 8 to 16 gigs of ram in there throw an SSD and a hard drive on there it does have support from dual graphics cards but because it is 16 X or 8 X 8 X some people might not be comfortable installing to high-end parts so 2 value cards or one high-end card is a great choice for this and I'm very excited about the upcoming bulldozer CPUs which are fully supported by this board don't forget to subscribe the Linus tech tips from boxing's reviews and other computer videos