Introduction

With a new FX-8150 on hand, we're finally able to get back to testing the 990FX boards that have built up over the last few weeks. The first to go back onto the testbed comes from GIGABYTE and sits in as part of the popular UD5 series.

Personally, I don't see enough UD5s. In the looks department it's one of my favorite boards as it follows that black PCB and blue tint throughout the heatsink. Today we fortunately get the chance to look at the UD5 in the form of the GA-990FXA-UD5.

Before we look at the packaging and move closer into the board itself, it's worth mentioning the death of our FX-8150 and what's changing now. It seems that we're not the only one who has killed an FX-8150. The consistent trend is that the issue has been seen only when overclocking. Because we don't want to run the risk of killing a second FX-8150 we'll, be putting our CPU on light duties.

Look at it in the way that you hurt your back and now you're back at work, while you're working, you're not working as hard as you were prior to the incident. We still intend to overclock, but we'll be keeping our voltages even lower than the recommended numbers from AMD. Of course, we'll talk about this more in the overclocking side of things in just a few pages.

For now, the first thing we need to do is look at the package and see what GIGABYTE is offering us. Once we've done that we'll take a closer look at the board itself before we check out the BIOS, cover overclocking and then get into the performance side of things.

The Package

Checking out the box, we've got that normal UD5 look going on with a smaller box when compared to the bigger UD7. It doesn't flip open like the bigger box, but turning over, we've got a picture of the board along with a large amount of detail covering a lot of the main features that are on offer from the 990FXA-UD5.

Checking out the package, there's not heaps going on. We've got two pieces of paperwork, driver CD, four SATA cables, a single SLI bridge and 3-Way SLI bridge and our standard rear I/O shield.