GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

Introduction:

The Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 is the lowest end AM3+ Motherboard from the 990FXA line from Gigabyte.
It has Four DIMM's supporting 2400 Ram, Four PCI-E 16x slots, Two PCI-E 1x slots and a single PCI slot. The entire motherboard
it black and is very sleek looking. It has heatsinks on the north bridge and mosfets. It has cooling on the FXA chipset as well.

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Review:

This is a very good looking motherboard being fully black, with only some white writing on it. It has Four PCI-E 16x slots, two wired for full 16x
and the other two only wired for 4x. This means it supports 2-Way Crossfire and SLI at 16x/16x. The PCI slot is at that bottom meaning even with Crossfire you can use that PCI slot.

There is one internal USB 3.0 Header and three USB 2.0 headers. There is quite alot of room around the CPU socket
giving greater support for Ram and aftermarket cooler combos. There are Six Sata III 6gb/s ports as well. It is a ATX motherboard needing seven expansion slots, and the rear I/O has two USB 3.0, eight USB 2.0, 7.1 Audio ports, two Esata, a SPDIF out port and a PS2 combo port.

This is definitely a performance motherboard. It was meant for performance computing, supporting a massive 32GB of Ram, and 2-Way Crossfire and SLI. This is a great choice for the PC Gamer on a budget. It supports all AM3 and AM3+ Processors.

This motherboard would best be paired with an Eight Core processor and a HD 7970/GTX 680 in my opinion.
This is also a great motherboard for the overclocker, and is very good at achieving high overclocks that cheaper motherboards cannot sustain.

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Conclusion:

This is a solid motherboard. It's great for overclocking, It supports a wide variety of CPU's, Ram and Graphics card configurations.
It isn't that expensive either. This is certainly on my recommended list.

I got this board for a very cool 100$ on black Friday and I've been working with it since, trying to get a decent overclock out of my 1045T. This board overclocks fairly well, considering that I was able to get a 40%+ FSB overclock from my low binned Thuban. Personally I haven't had any problems with NB overheating at all, I have my NB at 2200mhz and it idles at ~30C which is respectable considering that the NB heatsink is very wobbly and is held in place by plastic-spring "locks" rather than nuts and bolts. I'd imagine that replacing the locks with bolts or screws should yield even better temperatures but I've not had a reason to do so. The motherboard posts fairly quick and the BIOS is your classic gigabyte bios; easy and simple.

The only negative point I can think of is LLC causing a fair amount of vboost, regardless of what setting I choose. Gigabyte needs to iron out LLC, but it's nothing deal breaking.

In conclusion, I think it's a great board board for the price. I can't talk about this board's overclocking limitations because I can only push my FSB so far. But it seems to run 280mhz FSB without a problem so I'd imagine that it would overclock like a champ with a multiplier unlocked CPU.

P.S - This review is for rev 1.1. I believe that the new rev 3.0 comes with a EFI bios and some other PCB improvements so it should be a fair step up from this board.