Introduction

Over the coming months as we build up towards finally getting our hands on the Bulldozer platform, we'll no doubt be looking at plenty of 990FX based motherboards from companies. Having already looked at what ASUS offered us in their ROG Crosshair V Formula board, today we'll take the time to check out the GIGABYTE option.

While GIGABYTE do have a few 990FX options, we've gone straight to the top today and will be checking out the 990FXA-UD7 which carries with it those lovely aesthetics we're used to seeing from the UD7 series.

With the full package on hand, we'll get stuck into the box and what's inside before taking a closer look at the board itself. Once that's done, we'll venture into the BIOS to see what's going on before we take a closer look at our testbed, overclocking and then of course, performance.

The Package

In typical UD7 fashion we've got a really big box that opens up and shows us part of the board itself, and gives us an absolute wealth of information that shows us a bunch of the features that the UD7 version of the 990FX based board offers us.

Most of the bundle is fairly standard; we've got some paperwork, sticker, driver CD and I/O shield, along with four SATA cables.

Also included are a bunch of SLI and CrossFire cables in the package. We've got a 4-Way and 3-Way SLI bracket, a single SLI bridge and two CrossFire bridges.