GA-990FXA-UD5 Living Review

[absic]

Thanks cchaos,

I know you are interested in this particular board and it is working well. So far I have only been testing the system in AHCI Mode using the AMD SB950 SATA controller but I have already noticed that when transferring large files from HDD to another the transfer speed is higher than on the GA-890FXA-UD5. Yesterday I transferred one file of 10 Gig from one SATA 6GB/s HDD to another 6GB/s drive and it shot across at about 100MB sec on average. The same file transferred to a SATA 3 GB/s HDD copied at around 65MB/s

As the title of this thread states, this is a living review and as such I am actually testing and using the board at the same time, much as any user would do. I am planning to test the RAID features within the next few days and then, once I am happy that everything is stable and working fine, I will do some overclocking.

Don't forget, if  anyone has any questions or want me to look at something specific just ask and I will do my best to help.

[Night Gyr]

absic,

Could you please also measure the northbridge and the VRM temps at start/at idle after some time/under load? The last one is probably not possible as you're not benchmarking yet, but the first two readings are really interesting to me. (And if you do so, please specify the geographical location/ambient temperatures you're having there.)

[absic]

Hi Night Gyr,

at the moment I am still trying to find some software that will report things accurately. I am not sure which software I can trust as nothing seems to be correct, although I may be mistaken. All of the apps I have tried so far are reporting the AMD SB950 chipset as the AMD850 chip. However I will post back with some screen shots of the information I have so you can see what's going on.

EDIT:
Here are some screen shots of different monitoring programmes and how they are reporting things at the moment.





As you can see the CPU temps differ widely from 17C - 30C. I have to say that I believe EasyTune6 is showing the closest figures as the ambient temp here is 22C but it is very limited in what it actually shows and as such, is not really very helpful.  

[Night Gyr]

External temp meters? Like those multimeter-like, that allow you to touch the surface and get the temp.

[absic]

I have thought of that but not very practical as most of the essential parts are buried beneath the heatsinks. However, the whole system does seem cooler than the GA-890FXA-UD5 (rev 2.1) board that I was using and, where I can finger test heatsinks etc nothing is making me jump. The Southbridge is so cool to the touch that it makes me wonder if it is actually working and, if TMPIN0 is referring to the Southbridge then 32C would seem about right to me.

My 1090T CPU has always run around the 25C mark, since I fitted the Noctua Cooler and this may be the figure showing as TMPIN1. However CoreTemp is showing the individual cores to be at between 15C- 18C the same figures that HWMonitor is reporting them at. But, as you can see, AMD Overdrive is reporting the cores at 30C so something is wrong there. However AMD Overdrive is also reporting the Southbridge as the AMD 800 Chip rather than as the AMD 950 that it should!


That would leave TMPIN2 as the Northbridge and again, where I can touch the Heatsink this is again feeling very cool. The figures reported for motherboard temps maybe accurate but I can't state categorically that they are.


EDIT:
Here is a screen shot of how BIOS is reporting things.

[Night Gyr]

Well that's nice to hear. See I have an EVGA SLI3 (X58) here and... well, I haven't cared enough about airflow yet, but the idea is, that the NB is *very* hot. Maybe that's because I'm using a top-down cooler that exhausts hot CPU air onto the NB. (Sorry if I'm hijacking your thread , but I'm telling you this to justify asking - do you use a top/down cooler for the test benches? Or could you possibly use one and post the results?)

Re the 850/950 question:
They say they use the same silicon, but different firmware or microcode/BIOS/how's it called. So this is no surprise for me

[Night Gyr]

Also, regarding the heatsinks:

May you (that is, if you own the board or are allowed to disassemble it or take other potentially destructive actions) unscrew the heatsinks, take a look there and possibly take a photo and post it here? I know EVGA has it perfect, ASUS could not care less about it, now Gigabyte seems to be trying to get into the hi-fi market, and I wonder how they got it this time.

[absic]

Sorry I don't have a top down cooler to test with but, I would have thought that if anything, they would improve the airflow around the Northbridge.

Here is an image taken from the review I did for the GA-890FXA-UD5 which shows the temps reported for that:


As you can see the GA-990FXA-UD5 does seem to be cooler overall.

[Night Gyr]

Thanks!

I had been referring ti the TIM application there in the previous post, sorry for being unclear. Too much gaming with pros online, my brain is full of frags not words now

[absic]

No problem I actually understood what you were looking for! 
No wonder my wife says that I am a geek when she introduces me to her friends. 

[geekyadz]

What power supply would you recommend for the board? Im just wondering if my old one will be up for the job or if you think its worth getting a new one

[absic]

I'm running a Corsair 620 Watt  Modular PSU. Depending on what you are going to install I would suggest a good 550 Watt PSU or above. Bear in mind that the older your PSU the more chance it will be giving less power than stated, as they do deteriorate over time.

[Night Gyr]

Same PSU here!

I always say to the people looking for the best PSU available: it's da Seasonic Semi-Passively Cooled Fully Modular PSU's. You can't get any better than that IMO. Well, same as EVGA boards

Now there's one thing I don't like about this new Gigabyte 900 Series lineup:
There's no 990X (8x + 8x) board using the new tech (MOSFETS, black PCB, rich I/O) as opposed to ASUS. Look at the M5A99 EVO - has it all and even more than that. ( at GB fans). Would be nice to see a 990X-UD4 or UD3 like that.

[absic]

OK I have just run my first stress test using Heavyload to see what temps are created when the CPU & RAM are maxed out. I have to say that I am mightily impressed! The BIOS settings are still pretty much at the default settings and I have made no changes to any of the settings under the M.I.T. section. This will be looked at in greater detail when I get around to trying out the overclocking capabilities of this board.



As you can see from this after running Heavyload for an hour the Motherboard temp never went above 33°C the CPU didn't go above 39°C and the TMPIN2 (which I believe to be the Northbridge) didn't climb above 46°C. The ambient temp is 24°C.

Bear in mind, when looking at these figures that I am using a 3rd Party Noctua cooler and that my case does have 6 fans and very good airflow.

[Night Gyr]

Nice!

Do they fans make noise BTW? Any noticeable noise? Because temps is nice, but as for me, 'm aiming at a building a completely silent computer.

Anyway much better that the X58 boards. Now the only thing left to figure out is the thermal paster application AND if there;s any thermal paster at all or is this pure crappy TIM pads.