AMD FX9590 (5ghz) Review (w/ Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5)

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell July 14, 2013 CPU, Featured Tech Reviews, Motherboard

While we have reviewed some of the Gigabyte Z87 boards in recent weeks, it has been quite a while since we looked at a 990FX board from the company. The 990FXA-UD5 has received AMD Validation, along with the ASUS Crosshair & Sabertooth. We have heard a few horror stories behind closed doors in the last week that getting the FX9590 completely stable at 4.7-5.0ghz isn't easy.

The motherboard ships with a rather good bundle, including 2 way and 3 way SLI connectors, a manual, software disc, Gigabyte sticker, backplate and SATA cables.

The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 is an ATX form factor board, measuring 30.5cm x 24.4cm.

The PCB is black and features some heavy duty heatsinks around the CPU socket to help with the cooling of the VRM's.

The motherboard has four DDR3 memory slots which support DDR3 2000(O.C.)/1866/1600/1333/1066 MHz memory modules. These operate in dual channel mode.

South Bridge:

6 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (SATA3_0~SATA3_5) supporting up to 6 SATA 6Gb/s devices.
Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID5, RAID 10 and JBOD.

2 x Marvell 88SE9172 chips:

2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (GSATA3_6, GSATA3_7) supporting up to 2 SATA 6Gb/s devices.
2 x eSATA 6Gb/s connectors on the back panel supporting up to 2 SATA 6Gb/s devices.
Support for RAID 0 and RAID 1.

2 x PCI Express x16 slots, running at x16 (PCIEX16_1, PCIEX16_2)
1 x PCI Express x16 slots, running at x8 (PCIEX8) (Note 4)
2 x PCI Express x16 slots, running at x4 (PCIEX4_1, PCIEX4_2)
1 x PCI Express x1 slot

(All PCI Express slots conform to the PCI Express 2.0 standard.)

1 x PCI slot

1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port.
1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector.
1 x IEEE 1394 port.
8 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports.
2 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports.
2 x eSATA 6Gb/s connector.
1 x RJ-45 port.
6 x audio jacks (Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out/Rear Speaker Out/Side Speaker Out/Line In/Line Out/Microphone).

Along the bottom of the board from left to right are : Audio connector, a fan header, several USB headers, TPM and front panel connectors. There is a single 8 pin power connector to maintain CPU stability.