Gigabyte has a frustrating habit of releasing a dozen motherboard models per chipset, and sometimes more—we counted no fewer than 15 Gigabyte boards based on Intel’s X58 chipset. That isn’t the case in 890FX land, where Gigabyte offers just two variants to choose from—the GA-890FXA-UD5, and the board reviewed here.
By choosing to build the GA-890FXA-UD7 around the little-known XL-ATX formfactor, Gigabyte ensures its board won't fit in most standard ATX cases.
The differences between the two are big, and we mean that literally. Unlike the UD5, the UD7 ditches the tried-and-true standard ATX formfactor and comes constructed in XL-ATX, which is even larger than Extended ATX (E-ATX). Only folks with full towers need apply, and even then you’ll want to verify with your case manufacturer that an XL-ATX motherboard will fit. Gigabyte’s Chassis Support List of qualified cases is disappointingly sparse, though not all-inclusive.
It quickly became apparent why Gigabyte needed all that real estate. The UD7 comes crammed with six PCI-E slots with support for an indulgent quad-CrossFireX setup. Further making use of the ample space, Gigabyte takes you on a trip down memory lane by including both legacy IDE and floppy ports, the only board in this AM3 roundup to do so. This in addition to eight forward-facing SATA ports, onboard buttons (power, reset, and clear CMOS), and a standard PCI slot. We didn’t find the kitchen sink, but Gigabyte did the next best thing by tossing in a water-cooling block already attached to the north bridge.
The UD7 came roaring out of the gate by narrowly winning nine out of the 15 benchmarks in our three-way AM3 grudge match, but then faltered when it came time to overclock. Manual tweakers don’t have anything to worry about, but using Gigabyte’s EasyTune software was laborious. The process took so long we had to walk away, only to return to find that Windows had crashed. Uncool.
890FX
X58
Quad CrossFireX support; top-notch performance; ports aplenty.
XL-ATX formfactor; painfully slow auto-overclocking tool; expensive.
Print
