Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 Rev 4.0 Motherboard Review: Old but Gold
Final Thoughts about the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 Rev 4.0 Motherboard
Despite the low price as the second most affordable 990FX board currently in the market, the 990FXA-UD3 Rev. 4.0 from Gigabyte also has the distinction of fully supporting the 220W AMD FX processors out of the box. It has been revised several times in the past but this last revision drastically changes many things, especially with the power delivery to offer full support for these power hungry CPUs. The digital PWM controller, better chokes and heatpiped VRM cooling are all physically obvious and also very much tangible when in action.
With those improvements, one would think there would be drastic cuts feature wise but this is surprisingly not the case at all. Gigabyte opted not to add two more SATA ports via a 3rd party controller which is a common feature on higher-end 990FX motherboards but a Marvell controller adds E-SATA support. Although not using the popular ASMedia controllers, the choice of the VIA controllers for USB 3.0 is also preferable over the EtronTech USB 3.0 controller which are known to cause problems and BSODs. Gigabyte also threw in Firewire support, as was found in previous 990FX-UD3 revisions. Compared to most other 990FX offerings, the use of a Realtek ALC889 is also superior to the Realtek ALC892 found on ASUS M5A99FX motherboard (closest competitor 220W FX CPU supporting motherboard in price at $149). Multi-GPU is limited to 2-way SLI but that is expected from sub $150 990FX motherboards, as is the use of a Realtek Gigabit LAN controller. It is really quite difficult to actually pin point where Gigabyte made cuts on the design to keep the price so low.
If I had to nitpick (and I have to), my only complaints on this motherboard would be that it could use larger heatsinks for the VRM and better LLC controls in the UEFI. I could not use the EXTREME LLC setting and it was not clear what each setting meant as the value indicator did not change from the default 100%. The UEFI itself is not as great as the latest one found in the Z97 versions but it is serviceable and supports mouse usage. Also, only four fan headers with only two of them PWM is something that newer Z97 motherboards have spoiled me with so it was hard to go back to the old way of just having a few.
Overall, the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 Rev. 4.0 offers excellent value and performance flexibility that is unbeatable value-wise. There is no reason why this should not be everyone’s first choice if building an AMD FX based system now. Plus the money saved when buying this motherboard fits well with the whole AMD bang-for-buck philosophy. Gigabyte’s UD3 line has long been a darling of many budget-limited enthusiasts and the Rev 4.0 990FXA-UD3 continues that tradition. Considering the closest competitor that fully supports 220W AMD FX processors out of the box costs $30 more and the fact that the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 Rev. 4.0 offers plenty of features for all levels of AMD FX processor users, it easily earns Modders-Inc’s Editor’s Choice Award. It may be old and look gray, but the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 Rev 4.0 shines bright performance-wise and is pound-for-pound the best value 990FX motherboard available.
