Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 Motherboard Review - PAGE 3

The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 will be pit against the ASUS Crosshair V Formula. The two patches for Bulldozer have been applied to the operating system.

Test Setup

• AMD FX-8150 processor
• Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5
• ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard
• XFX Radeon HD 7970 videocard
• Seagate 750GB 7200.11 hard drive
• Mushkin Joule 800W power Supply
• 2x4GB Mushkin DDR3-1866 9-9-9-24-1T memory
• Corsair Graphite 600T chassis

Benchmarks

• SiSoft Sandra Professional
• 7-Zip
• PCMark 7
• Handbrake
• POV-Ray
• Cinebench
• HDTune
• Far Cry 2
• Colin McRae DiRT 2
• 3DMark 11

Overclocking

No magic is required to overclock the Gigabyte board; it's done the same way as all the other AM3 and AM3+ boards. This time however, the expectations were high so right off the bat the processor was set to 4.5GHz via its unlocked multiplier. It happily ran at that clock, so the clock got increased another 100MHz. 4.7GHz proved too much though, so with a reference clock adjustment, it ended up at a stable 4636MHz on the cores. What clearly limited the core clock is the important voltage drop under load, commonly known as vdroop. In fact, the voltage needed to be set higher so that after the drop it would remain sufficient for stability. It's a tad worrying because the higher voltage at idle can effectively work toward damaging the processor. The vdroop is represented in the screenshot below by the maximum and minimum reading in HwMonitor. For overclocking the IMC, the same principle was applied. Finally, it was a matter of finding the right settings that would maximize both frequencies simultaneously.

So here are the final settings used:

• Reference Clock of 244MHz
• CPU Ratio of x19 resulting in 4636MHz
• Memory Ratio of 1:4 resulting in 1952MHz
• CPU/NB Ratio of 11 resulting in 2684MHz
• HT link Ratio of x13 resulting in 3172MHz
• CPU Voltage of 1.625V
• CPU/NB Voltage of 1.375V

It therefore falls short compared to the other board:

A small overclocking session with LN2 had been also planned. Originally, the ASUS Crosshair V Formula was going to be the board of choice due to its better performance with liquid cooling, but it had a small problem and therefore the Gigabyte had a chance to prove what it really is capable of by taking its place. It ended up being able to take a suicide screenshot at 7.587GHz. Considering there is absolutely no binning involved here and a quite ordinary home-made cooling pot was used in comparison to the better ones designed by Aaron Shradin (seen during the AMD Bulldozer Overclocking Demonstration), it's not shabby at all.